


Some Kind of Tomorrow

by togina



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hill Magic, M/M, Mpreg, Schmoop, Season/Series 02, consideration of abortion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-26
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-11-05 04:33:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11006082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: Poison ain't the only brewing Mags knows, and she's been waiting a long time to punish Raylan Givens for crushing her boy's knee. Sometimes the best way to pay a man back is to give him something he ain't never wanted and watch him squirm. Of course, if she'd known that Raylan would take up with Boyd Crowder, she'd have poisoned him right off and saved them all a mess.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dancinbutterfly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinbutterfly/gifts).



> Firstly, you need to have seen Season 2 to make much sense of this fic, because while it is canon divergent it also shamelessly borrows from the overarching season plot without explanation or apology. I've stretched the plot of season 2 over nine months or so for obvious reasons, and so expect to see plot points such as Boyd and the great mine explosion, Mags and apple pie, Baines and the taser, Loretta, Coover, and Carol Johnson and Boyd outsmarting her. That said, entire episodes are ignored and some plot lines have been cut (namely Winona and the cash), while others disappear because they no longer work given the context and characters' choices. If you are confused please feel free to ask me what on earth is going on!
> 
> Secondly, no this is not tagged incorrectly, apparently I actually wrote mpreg, which is astonishing to me since I normally don't even read mpreg, so really you should go thank dancinbutterfly, because it turns out that I'll do things I never thought I would if you offer to donate a fair bit of money to the ACLU. It was also her idea to make male pregnancy a type of vengeance, so go ask her for the version of reality where this is brilliant hill witch history. (This was written around Feb. 2017, so the money was originally supposed to go to Planned Parenthood, and you'll see a nod to their clinics in the fic, and should definitely support them financially or through volunteer work if you can.) My surprise aside, I had a lot of fun with it and I hope you enjoy it and I'd be happy to chatter on with you about hedgewitch Mags or the Crowder-Givens family!
> 
> Finally, the title is from a Toni Morrison quote which seemed stunningly relevant to Raylan and Boyd: "Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow." - _Beloved_

Folks in the Kentucky hills have known for hundreds of years that you don't need a woman to have an heir. That sometimes you can take from the hills, from the earth, and create. If you have the right sort of help, that is. (Of course, you still need two people to make a third. Hill magic only augments the Good Lord’s plan.) Mags Bennett had learned her trade from her great-grandmama up in the hills, same as she’d learned how to distill a perfect jar of apple pie.

Time was, her great-grandmama taught her, the best way to punish a man for hurting your tads was to give him one of his own and no way to get it out but a knife. The best kinds of vengeance have their own harmonies, and Mags has been waiting her vengeance on Raylan Givens for a very long time.

Frances had asked for a truce, after Dickie, and Mags had agreed. Didn't much like it, but she knew where the Givenses led the Crowders would follow. Besides, Pervis had only died a few years before and Mags was struggling to keep her family afloat, right then, much less alive. But Frances is long dead and gone, now, and Raylan Givens is in Bennett, in her store, and Mags has been saving a very special batch of apple pie in the hopes he would come by.

To be honest, Mags thinks it will be Ava's baby that finds its way into Raylan’s apple pie womb. (Everyone in three counties knows that girl’s had eyes for Raylan since she was twelve, knows that Raylan has been sleeping in Bowman and Ava’s marriage bed.) Or if not Ava, then one of the other women that boy’s always charmed into eating bullshit right out of his hand.

She had thought that whole other thing — Raylan looking for Boyd, _always_ looking for Boyd — had ended with high school, with baseball games and her baby’s two good knees.

But: "I'm looking for Jimmy Earl Dean," Raylan says, then peers into her store’s every crevice like he might find Boyd Crowder crouched behind a pickle jar, not looking for Jimmy at all.

And then Raylan goes to the mine, goes after Boyd. Of course he does. Mags ought to have known. Time had been, those boys could find each other anywhere in the county; like they'd been born with a third eye, an innate grasp of the centuries of hill magic she'd had to learn. Time was, one boy could find the other a thousand feet underground or in a diner two towns away.

_Buy you a drink_ , Raylan says, and anyone could tell you where that story led.


	2. Chapter 2

Raylan can't trust Boyd. He can't. He doesn’t need Boyd’s criminal file on his desk to tell him that. But the lost, injured man who'd come to him a week prior had looked an awful lot like the nineteen-year-old boy that had watched Raylan drive away.

 _Tell me about your God_ , Boyd had said, and Raylan had nearly answered, "I found Him when He didn't let us die. When He let me pull you out of the cut before you lit that fuse and died, and then you pulled me out of the mine."

He could have let Gio’s woman go, after fetching Boyd and getting him to the hospital he sorely required. It didn't matter to Raylan what Gio had planned. It didn’t matter until Gio’s plans got Boyd shot, and Raylan found out all over again that Boyd being shot was one bullet more than Raylan could take.

Raylan fixed things with Gio, but Boyd still looks _miserable_ , streaked with coal dust and drinking bourbon like water from a desert spring. (How Winona complained that Raylan drank it, the summer before they divorced.) Raylan’s always known the quickest way to cure Boyd’s blues — both of them naked and hard, Raylan’s hand on Boyd’s cock and Boyd’s teeth worrying Raylan’s neck — but it’s not like they can go back to Boyd's, who's sleeping in Ava's spare room, and they're certainly not driving three and a half hours to Raylan's bloodied motel.

But there's always the places they tucked themselves away from the world, the first time around, before they both ran out of Harlan County and into the kind of violence that came with an official stamp. And Raylan can admit to himself that he’s not just doing this to make Boyd smile.

"You planning for us to do this thing in the back of your town car?" Boyd wonders, but he's biting his cheek, close to a grin as he's come since Raylan dropped by his church camp and offered up a prayer.

(They do “this thing” in the back of Boyd's truck. Twice. Raylan says they need to pass the time until it's late enough that no one will see Boyd drop him back at his car, and Boyd doesn’t complain.)

(Sex in the back of a Bronco at forty is not the same as it is at nineteen. Boyd's leg cramps, and Raylan’s back screams for some codeine and a heating pad.)

And it's nothing. It's nothing. That's what Raylan tells himself, on the drive home.

It wasn’t like he’d watched Boyd's truck in his rearview mirror, the Bronco idling by the road until Raylan vanished around the curve. It wasn’t like Boyd had parked there and waited for Raylan's taillights to fade from view.

 

Art asks what Crowder's new angle is, the next day, and Raylan shrugs. Schools his face, and suggests that maybe Boyd gave up on God and found coal instead, just like every other soul in Harlan for the past hundred years.

Raylan doesn't think about it, after it happens. (He _doesn't_ ; doesn’t haunt Harlan or spend too much time dropping by Ava’s house no matter what Art implies.)

Then he goes back to Mags’s store — and this is why he hadn't wanted the fucking transfer to Kentucky, dammit, nothing stays dead in the hills, nothing stays buried like it should — and asks if she's got any more of her famous apple pie, and she smirks, and says, "You sure you ought to be drinking, Raylan? A man in your condition?"

"Excuse me?" Raylan says, because Jesus Christ, it's not like being on duty ever stopped him from drinking before, and her son's a dirty cop to boot. (And maybe he’d hoped to charm a jar off her, get Loretta the phone, and then, possibly, drive over to see who was working the day shift at the mine. Boyd had always appreciated a deep drink of apple pie.)

"I'm off duty," he says, though it’s a weekday and it ain’t yet gone five.

"Not the sort of condition I meant, _Deputy_ ," she replies, and winks. "You know we sell all sorts of things a body needs, in this store? You might be interested in this section, over here. Loretta calls it the ‘grown up’ section."

Of course, the section holds condoms — Raylan suspects they're all expired, because if folks ever bothered to buy them, blood feuds would have died out generations ago. (Then he thinks of Boyd, naked, in the back of a truck, and purses his lips.) Condoms and KY and pregnancy tests.

For a moment, he thinks she’s gesturing at the condoms, maybe mocking his quiet plans to nick a jar of moonshine and take Boyd Crowder somewhere discreet, but Raylan can’t think how that’d stop him from drinking and Mags seems to be gazing at the …

Pregnancy tests.

_Fuck._

Raylan didn't grow up in a city — which meant he wasn't a fucking moron, like the rest of his office when it came to the hills — and he'd heard tell of men having sons without relying on a woman to carry them to term.

He'd heard his mama have folks over, talking about making babies, heard her offer them a drink and send them on to Cousin Mary up the road a ways.

“Well, shit,” Raylan curses, staring at the pregnancy tests and the condoms and tampons in the Bennett store. “I think you’ll find yourself regretting this, Mags.”

Mags snorts. “What, regret you having Ava Crowder’s baby?” she asks, proving she doesn’t know half of what Raylan had thought. “You think I can’t handle the Crowders and Givenses as kissing kin?”

Raylan shrugs, pushes his hat farther back on his head. “Well, you’re half right,” he says amiably, bites down the hysterical laughter creeping up his throat. “Though to be truthful, Mags, I ain’t so sure I can handle it myself.”

 

He leaves Mags wondering what the hell he meant and goes to freak out in his car where she can’t see. He doesn’t bother stealing a pregnancy test. Mags is famous for her brews and her hill clan pedigree — there’s no way a pregnancy she planned wouldn’t take.

He drives the hairpin turns out of Bennett, both hands gripping the wheel. He could just get rid of it. No one but Mags would know. Well, Mags and the other hill witch he’d have to pay for the remedy.

Raylan could just keep on with things as they are, never say a word about it to Boyd. It isn’t like Boyd could miss what he’d never expect might exist. It isn’t like either of them are suited to fatherhood in any way.

Raylan clears the county line before he realizes he’s dropped his left hand to his lap, pressed a clammy palm to his flat stomach while he refuses to think about how Boyd’s smile splits his face when he’s too pleased to feign nonchalance. (Refuses to think about the way Boyd smiles every time he sees Raylan.)

He finds himself cresting a hill and looking down on the town of Harlan clustered in the valley. Somehow, Raylan’s put the car on Laurel Creek Road, turned on Old Abner Branch Road and heading for a house he hasn’t lived in for twenty years. It’s muscle memory: win the baseball game up-county, get drunk in the other team’s parking lot and drive home swinging at mailboxes and hollering folks out of bed. Art’s government-issued GPS might never find its way through Harlan, but the county’s backroads are etched deep and coal-dark in the palms of Raylan’s hands.

He needs to get back to Lexington. The day’s half gone — he’d meant to get to Ava’s house, ask her or Boyd about Bowman’s side business, maybe stop for ice cream before returning to Lexington for takeout with a side of Winona lamenting the details of her second divorce, though Raylan thinks she ought to be a pro at it by this point. Instead, he’s taken every backroad from Bennett to Harlan like he’s eighteen and drunk off warm beer, swinging at mailboxes and trying to hit his daddy, taking aim at the whole damn county with his favorite bat. Driving like he’s nineteen and smeared with coal dust and come, racing down every pitted dirt road with his jeans still undone, fleeing the mines and Boyd Crowder and the sudden, unwelcome realization of just who Raylan Givens is.

But here he is now, forty years old and pulling into a Crowder’s driveway searching for Boyd, no different than the boy he’d been at nineteen. (He’d thought that boy had died, but it turned out that Raylan had only left him in Harlan, kid with a bad attitude and coal dust worked into his bloody knuckles, smoking cigarettes by the pack while he waited twenty years for Raylan to come home.)

There are two gun-toting thugs sitting on Ava’s pretty floral-patterned loveseat on her porch. They come to their feet as he pulls into the drive. Raylan’s hand goes to his gun. He opens the door, slides out of the town car without shutting the door behind him — he might need the protection. Generally, any men eager to shoot a Crowder will be equally pleased to dump a Givens in the same grave. The fact that Raylan doesn’t recognize any of these assholes don’t mean much; he’s been away for twenty years, time enough to raise a whole new generation of angry hillbillies loaded with more ammunition than sense.

“Who the hell are you?” the thug on the left demands, spitting tobacco juice into Ava’s flowers. “What business you got with Boyd?”

Well, there’s one question answered. The thugs certainly aren’t here for Ava; and they haven’t mentioned her, which means she’s probably safe at work. Of course, they have blocked the front door, so it’s also likely that they have compatriots inside and reason not to want Raylan past the threshold. It’s possible that they’ve already done something to Boyd. Raylan’s hand tightens on his gun.

Then a third asshole tumbles out the lace-curtained front door, hones in on Raylan and comes down the stairs quick. “Well, look at the U.S. Marshal,” the newest thug declares, and Raylan’s shoulders ease. Somebody smarter might guess at Raylan’s affiliation with the law, but the only way for these dumb fucks to know exactly what Raylan does would be if someone _told_ them, and that means Boyd isn’t dead. He keeps his hand on his weapon, though, just in case. Boyd being alive is no guarantee that Raylan won’t get shot, and the last thing Raylan needs now is a hospital and blood tests and Art finding out that Raylan is –

Raylan bites the inside of his cheek, hard, and focuses on the surly, three-headed issue at hand.

“Seems you folks have the better of me,” he returns, stepping away from the car and heading for the porch despite the suspiciously friendly jackass in his way. “You know my business, and I can only begin to guess at yours.”

“Why, we’re friends of Boyd’s,” the ostensible leader of their pack announces with an overly bright grin. The man seems to be lying, but it is equally plausible that these idiots _are_ friends of Boyd’s, that Boyd’s promise to go straight had never meant a goddamned thing. “I’m Kyle, Kyle Easterly. We’ve just come to pick him up for work.”

“Ain’t that funny,” Raylan retorts, driving Kyle backwards toward the porch, stepping into the man’s space until his eyes flick down to Raylan’s gun and he backs another few paces away. “I thought I might drive Boyd to work this afternoon. We have a few personal matters to discuss.”

“What the hell does a federal want with Crowder?” one of the other thugs asks his friend, none too quietly. “He ain’t got no _personal_ association with the law.”

Raylan’s lip quirks, thinking of the back of Boyd’s truck outside the bar in Cumberland, the head of his cock pounding Boyd’s throat so raw that he was still rasping the next day. Or there was the time up in the woods where he and Boyd used to go and drink beer, that day after Raylan had saved Dewey Crowe’s wretched, idiot life. Raylan hadn’t even been certain Boyd would be there, that time, had only driven out to clear his head and found the truck parked behind a copse of trees. (What it comes down to, Raylan doesn’t say, is that Boyd Crowder has a close, personal, _intimate_ acquaintance with the law.) Raylan wonders which time it was that Mags’s poison took root in him, curled into his gut and bloomed.

“Well now, I’d say breaking the law makes it pretty personal,” Raylan says instead, smiling at the greasy asshole on the porch, half an eye on the kitchen and Boyd’s silhouette vanishing around the corner and hopefully moving into the front hall. “Now, fellas, if you don’t mind –”

Boyd opens the front door with a flourish, eyes on Raylan but his attention clearly on the three men between them. “Raylan,” he greets him, lips tight and voice flat, none of his usual showmanship on view. Raylan stops smiling. “Are you implying I’ve broken the law?”

“Have you?” Raylan replies, because it’s looking more and more likely with every second these men linger on Ava’s porch. Boyd shoves past the two by the door, and they follow him down the stairs like a retinue — or like prison guards. “What if I said I was in the neighborhood, and Mags suggested I offer you a ride to work?”

Boyd’s eyebrows lift and a faint flicker of his usual smirk dances across his lips. He tilts his head at Kyle, and Raylan rolls his eyes. Sure, he’s banked on Kyle not knowing who Mags is, but it ain’t much of a bet: the kid doesn’t look much like a local, and the last Easterly to live in Harlan had been shot dead by Eliphalet Givens two hundred years before.

“Well, Raylan, I’m afraid I already have a ride.” Boyd gestures at the three men boxing them in. Raylan frowns. They’re boxing _Boyd_ in. That isn’t the behavior of loyal, obedient goons — or at least, not goons loyal to Boyd. Something is off about this. “But I suppose you ain’t here merely to say hello to an old friend?”

“ _Friend_?” the long-haired goon echoes incredulously, and Raylan watches Boyd exhale real slow, the way he would when Bo had gotten drunk and loud, a whore on each side, hollering for Boyd to fetch him another beer. “Kyle, he’s friends with the law!”

“Pruitt, shut up!” Pruitt really needs to learn how to whisper, Raylan thinks, and it seems like Kyle Easterly concurs. “Ain’t like a man can choose his friends.”

Raylan raises an eyebrow and politely refrains from laughing in Kyle’s face. Boyd stares at Kyle for a long moment, sober and unblinking. “No,” he agrees, finally, “no, it ain’t.” The implications in what Boyd’s said and who he’s looking at make Raylan consider arresting all three men on suspicion of being assholes just to get them away from Boyd. “Now Kyle, if you’ll excuse us for a moment, Raylan and I have to discuss the merits of last night’s game.”

There are two sports in Harlan — three, if you count shooting anything that moves — and neither of them were played last night, but Kyle has already proven himself ignorant of several details of Harlan County life and Boyd’s dismissal is sufficient to send him away.

Raylan peers over Boyd’s shoulder, squinting into the late afternoon sun at the restless thugs stamping their dirty boots all over Ava’s white porch, standing awkwardly where their guns are tucked into their belts or under their coats.

“Boyd,” he says, closing his eyes for a moment, takes his hand off his gun and lifts his hat, runs his other hand through his hair. “Boyd, you think I can’t recognize a criminal at a hundred yards?”

Boyd had said that he was going straight. Had called Raylan to save Dewey instead of shooting Audrey’s up on his own. Of course, Boyd also lies, probably has done since he first spoke.

“You come to tell me about your eagle-eyed Marshal vision?” Boyd asks, arms relaxed at his sides but shoulders in a stiff line, standing like a man with cold steel pressed to his spine.

Raylan sighs. Boyd will do what he does, never mind anything Raylan says.

Well, maybe not.

Maybe if Raylan tells Boyd about what Mags said, about the apple pie and the hill magic and the pregnancy tests. Maybe then Boyd would ...

“I come to ask if Bowman traded in illegal papers,” Raylan says, and if Boyd notices Raylan’s gaze shift down and to the right he doesn’t say a word, doesn’t up the ante or call Raylan’s bluff. “Draw checks and the like.”

“Well.” Boyd squints into the setting sun. Raylan takes off his hat, uses it to shade both their faces, wanting to see Boyd’s eyes. Boyd can lie through his teeth with sugar cubes unmelted on his tongue, but his eyes always sparkle with the joy of a good lie. “I imagine his widow would know more about Bowman’s enterprises than I would, Raylan, but I think it’s likely he did. Ava’s working a shift at the Cut ‘n Curl, if you’re interested.” Raylan nods and doesn’t move. Boyd’s summary dismissals have never worked on him. “Raylan,” Boyd says, speaking low, a warning in his tone and the muscle ticking in his clenched jaw. “Was that all?”

Raylan watches the three men watching them, pacing the porch with a restive energy Raylan recognizes from years as a federal agent waiting to bust down the door and make the arrest; he recognizes it from years as Arlo’s only son, men pacing his mama’s worn rugs waiting for the heist.

“You said you were going straight,” he mutters, sucks his lips in and hopes Boyd hasn’t caught the petulance in his voice, a grown man sounding like a teenaged girl. Raylan looks at the house and thinks about Boyd inside it with those men — thinks about Boyd going underground with those men, his shoulder still sore from the gunshot wound, weeks from being able to handle the recoil of a gun. Raylan thinks about pregnancy tests and apple pie.

“I told you the truth.” Boyd takes half a step closer to Raylan, though there’s no possibility that the idiots on the porch can hear. “Things ain’t always how they seem.”

“I told you to call me, if you needed help.” Raylan suspects Boyd might not realize exactly how things _seem_ : Boyd’s cheek is swollen, there’s a cut on his forehead and faint yellow bruising under one eye, and three armed thugs more concerned about flanking Boyd than about the lawman in their midst. “I am a little offended, I’ll admit, because it is fairly evident that you are in the midst of a predicament and yet you ain’t called.”

“You gave me your card.” Boyd’s hand goes to his back pocket, as if he’s tucked Raylan’s card into his wallet, though Raylan knows Boyd’s too smart to keep damning evidence on hand. “I wasn’t certain whose help you were offering, friend, yours or the law’s.”

“Does it make a difference?” Raylan asks. It does, of course. If Raylan was the man Doyle Bennett hoped, it wouldn’t matter: the law is just an ace in Doyle’s pocket, to be pulled indiscriminately with or without his gun. (On the other hand, if Raylan was the man Art Mullen hoped, it also wouldn’t matter: Raylan would be nothing but the law, on duty and off, the model citizen soldier of the U.S. Republic.) Boyd stares at him, careful and quiet, and Raylan remembers how disappointed Art was when Raylan slept with Ava and set Boyd Crowder free.

“You’ve got the number for my cell,” he says, and it feels like a confession, an admittance of sin. “I don’t make a habit of informing the office about my personal calls.”

The left corner of Boyd’s mouth lifts, and he drops his chin in a nod, breathes deep and exhales the tension from his chest. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he replies softly, gaze flicking over Raylan’s face, then back to the men shifting uneasily on the porch. “Now, I’m afraid I’m going to have to –”

“You ever think about having kids?” Raylan blurts out. He takes his time putting his hat back on, tugs it low so that Boyd can’t read too deeply into his blush. Boyd doesn’t _need_ _to_ _know_. Raylan can head into the hills tomorrow, or maybe the next day, find his mama’s kin and have the whole problem flushed out and gone by the week’s end.

Boyd stops and cocks his head, expression somewhere between fond amusement and a frown. “I can’t say that I have,” he answers, and, despite being Boyd Crowder, he’s probably telling the truth. “After all,” he adds, with a significant glance behind him, “folks have expectations of anyone born with the Crowder name. And that’s the folks who _don’t_ want us dead.”

Raylan’s hand shifts to his stomach. He tucks his thumb behind his belt buckle, tries to make it look more like a country boy’s swagger and less like a protective reaction to Crowders winding up dead.

Boyd doesn’t even glance down, though. He has no reason to; men might occasionally fall pregnant, in Harlan, but they certainly don’t get that way _accidentally_ , and he has no cause to believe Raylan’s aiming to start a brood.

Raylan _isn’t_ aiming to start a brood. There isn’t going to be a brood. Boyd is right: the only place in the world for a Crowder is at the end of a gun, living on one side and dying on the other. It isn’t any different for a Givens, no matter where he stands with the law. It would be better for any child of theirs never to be born.

“Raylan?”

“Yeah,” Raylan concedes, shaking his head, retreating to his car. “You’re right.” He tips his hat in an exaggerated farewell to the assholes trespassing on Ava’s property. “Keep yourself out of trouble, Boyd.”

“Same to you, Raylan,” Boyd returns, lifting a hand before heading back into the house. Raylan pulls out of the drive, eyes on the rearview mirror and the thugs attempting to loom over Boyd. He glances at the hand he’s pressed, unthinking, just over his belt, and wonders if they aren’t both already in the sort of trouble that can’t be wished away.

 

He gets the text a few minutes later, stopped off at Gilliam’s for an ice cream because he doesn’t much care to drive west into the setting sun.

 _I always wanted to teach someone to fish_ , it reads, an innocuous message from a number Raylan won’t save to his phone. _Bowman never had the patience for it_.

Raylan hides his smile in his soft-serve. He leans forward on his bench and watches the family at the table across from him, the little boy’s face still blotchy and his eyes red from bawling, his ice cream a melting heap on the ground. He watches the older girl, dark eyes and sixteen or so sparkling barrettes sticking out at odd angles from her hair. She sighs exasperatedly before plopping down next to her baby brother and offering him a lick of her rapidly melting, bubblegum-pink cone.

 _You fishing with bait or dynamite?_ he types in response, and he ain’t referring to all those bygone times when Boyd had tried to blow up Old Abner Creek.

His phone buzzes almost immediately with a response. Raylan wonders where Boyd is, at that moment: on the road, sequestered between goons one and two; changing into his coveralls outside the mines, goggles on and hardhat flattening his spiked hair; tucked into a corner of the tunnels and texting Raylan.

 _I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, Raylan._ The ice cream curdles in Raylan’s stomach, reading that. Boyd’s smart, sure, but he ain’t psychic. Raylan will be back in Lexington tomorrow, in a federal agency above the courthouse. Apparently Boyd will be there, too. _I hope you won’t be too angry with me._

 _You giving me reason to be?_ He tosses the rest of his melting ice cream into the trash, doesn’t spare a glance for the little girl screeching when her brother puts pink ice cream in her hair. He should drop by the Cut ‘n Curl, talk to Ava about her late husband, but Raylan doesn’t think he can stomach any more of Harlan this afternoon.

 _I think my mama would have liked a girl_ , Boyd replies, which is as good as a signed confession that yes, he’ll be giving Raylan a reason to be absolutely fucking furious come tomorrow. _We still have the dolls in the attic, I believe, the ones she bought before Bowman turned out to be a boy._

Raylan silences his phone, throws it into the passenger seat, and ignores it for the entire ride home.

When he gets back to the motel, he has twenty-two missed calls: ten from Art, two from Rachel, six from Tom Bergen with the Staties, one from Doyle Bennett and three from Vasquez. There’s also one more text from that same unsaved number, the notification flashing like a beacon on his phone.

_Do you believe that people can change?_

Raylan deletes the message with one hand, spins the wheel with the other and skids out of the parking lot. But deleting the message doesn’t prevent him from seeing it in his head during the drive over to the office, during the twenty seconds in the elevator or the interminable minutes suffering through Art’s rant about Raylan picking up his fucking phone, or during Vasquez’s explanation that the ATF are on their way to interrogate Boyd and Ava Crowder about the theft and the murders that have just occurred at one of Black Pike’s mines.

The question lingers like a physical ache, low in his gut, a swirling nausea whenever he closes his eyes and remembers telling Boyd to call, remembers leaving him with those goons and driving away — and maybe that ache’s the answer to Boyd’s query, right there. Or maybe it’s just morning sickness, because the only way folks change in Harlan is when someone fires a hole through their goddamned head.

* * *

The ATF can’t hold the Crowders on anything more than logical suspicion, so they let them go after putting everyone through one long, sleepless night.

They’re both lying, of course. Raylan tells Art as much when he asks, because Ava’s a godawful liar — though, given that she downplayed Bowman’s criminal ventures whenever Raylan had inquired into them, she’s a damn fine hand at evasive maneuvering — and Boyd’s voice has gone sweet and slow, Appalachian honey on the comb.

“You want us to arrest the asshole for _sweet talking_?” Art demands, though Boyd ain’t sweet talking so much as talking sweet. Raylan kicks his feet up onto his desk, drops his hat on his face and pretends to sleep through the litany of Art’s complaints about _goddamn Harlan bullshit, that’s what this is, Raylan Givens don’t you think I don’t know you’re as bad as any of ‘em, I’ve got your number in the call logs for Crowder’s phone_.

“Now Chief Deputy Marshal,” a familiar, honeyed voice interrupts, “are you telling me that it’s a crime for a man to speak with his oldest friend?”

“You ain’t my oldest friend,” Raylan insists from under his hat.

“Raylan Givens, you take that back.” Raylan can hear the smile in Boyd’s voice, the gentle edges of a harsh, tired grin. “Boy, I knew you in the womb.”

Raylan sets his hat on his desk and drops his feet back to the floor, yawns wide and fails to blink the sleep from his eyes.

Boyd’s out of handcuffs, rubbing his wrists as he strides from the conference room toward Raylan’s desk, calm and cool and confident, feigning ignorance to the dozens of eyes following his every move, a room full of federal agents swiveling to watch him with their hands reaching for their guns.

Art folds his arms and leans back so that he can glower at Boyd and Raylan at the same time. “I didn’t realize that shooting a man in the chest was an act of friendship,” Art avers pointedly, side-eyeing Raylan.

Boyd smiles his showman’s grin, lifts his shoulders in an elaborate, innocent shrug. “I wouldn’t expect you to,” Boyd replies, cocking his hip and leaning against the edge of Raylan’s desk, close enough to touch. “An upstanding Kentucky citizen like yourself. However, it is an unfortunate truth that things are done somewhat differently in our humble county, and a man frequently discovers his true friends only after the shooting’s stopped.”

Art’s scowl deepens, as if Boyd’s meandering description of the holler is a signed affidavit incriminating him and Raylan.

Raylan scrubs his hands over his face, yawns again, and puts his hat back on. “Boyd,” he says, stringing out the name, blinking hard and feeling like he has sand in his eyes. “Are you here for any particular reason, or just for the satisfaction you derive from antagonizing the man who pays my wage?”

Boyd flicks his wrist loosely at the office doors, and one of the ATF agents draws her gun. Raylan glares at her until she puts it away. “Ava decided to visit the ladies’ room before these kind gentlemen drive us on home. I am merely awaiting her return, and we will be on our way.”

“I didn’t ask that.” Raylan arches an eyebrow, gestures at Boyd’s hip against his desk and at Art’s reddening face. “I asked why you were _here_. At my desk. Harassing my boss.”

Boyd commandeers a chair from somewhere. He spins it to face the room, then drops onto it like a cowboy, legs splayed, hands clasped and forearms resting on the back of the chair. It’s as though he’s forgotten Art and the dozen trigger-happy agents scattered around the room are even there.

“Raylan, I was thinking about that baseball bat you had as a tyke. You remember that bat? Your mama’s brother carved it out of the old lightning-struck maple tree in our yard?”

Raylan remembers. The other boys in Little League had mocked him for the wooden bat with its uneven finish and the knife marks down the side. He suspects that Arlo had only allowed him to keep it because he’d come home after practice begging to give it away.

“You think your Aunt Helen kept it?” Boyd continues, bouncing his knee, excited about an old baseball bat despite three men dead and twenty thousand dollars missing and a long, exhausting night. “It would be a good bat for a kid to learn on.” Boyd doesn’t smile, but his gaze sparks, and Raylan’s always been drawn to that sort of heat. “You know, if he weren’t the sort of boy who cared to sit and fish.”

“Crowder.” Art interrupts, looking genuinely concerned. “Are you telling me that you’ve got a son stashed away somewhere?” He glowers at Raylan, clearly of the opinion that _Raylan_ knows all about this fabled Crowder heir.

Raylan curls forward in his chair, careful not to fold his hands over his stomach where both Boyd and Art would see. Raylan does know all about Boyd Crowder’s fabled heir — and he’s the only one who ever will.

Boyd twists around and smirks at Raylan’s boss. “Were you hoping to be invited to the baptism, Chief Deputy Mullen? Because, forgive me my errors, but I thought our respective Christianities did not intersect.”

“Boyd was just leaving,” Raylan announces, coming to his feet and hauling Boyd up by his elbow, after considering hauling him up by his ear. “Right this very moment, in fact. Where are the nice folks devoting their morning to driving you home?”

He drags Boyd away before Art can kill him for being a terrible Christian and a goddamned irritant to boot. Jesus Christ. Their kid would be even worse, probably — half Givens and half Crowder, a squalling mess of Bo and Arlo and Bowman and every sorry asshole for the last two hundred years. It would set the yard on fire playing with stolen matches, come running inside smiling with too many teeth, and dark hair that never stayed where it was combed.

“Boyd,” Raylan whispers, hesitant, hand resting on his belt, remembering Boyd in kindergarten, green paint smeared down one round cheek, poking Raylan in the back when they walked to the lunchroom, trying to make him fall out of line. “I need to talk to you.”

“Ready to go?” Ava asks, opening the glass door without bothering to walk through. “I’m aching for a shot of whiskey and my own bed.”

Boyd opens his mouth as if he might protest, staring hard at Raylan’s face. Raylan steps back, ducks his head and wishes for the hat he’d left on his desk. “That’s as sound a plan as I ever heard,” he says, cutting off any protest Boyd might have made. “You drive safe now, and try not to blow up anymore mines.”

What was he thinking, standing there about to tell Boyd? Boyd, who broke his promise to stay on the straight and narrow, who just now stole twenty grand from Black Pike? They are neither of them meant to be parents, no matter what Boyd says about fishing, never mind how Raylan could crouch behind a dark-haired child and teach them to swing his old bat. Lack of sleep has made him stupid. He’ll drive out into the hills tomorrow or the day after, and he won’t say another goddamned word to Boyd Crowder, no matter what false promises the man makes.

Boyd is still standing at the front of the office, watching Raylan. Raylan purses his lips and turns away.

* * *

A week goes by, and Raylan swears he’ll go out to the hills every morning. But then there’s things to do, fugitives to chase, witnesses to escort, and he never does. He goes to Baines and sees the taser coming toward his stomach and nearly shoots off the man’s hand.

It’s about that point, waiting for medics to come, that Raylan realizes he ain’t going to head into the hills for a cure. He drives down to Old Abner Creek instead, texts Boyd saying where he is. Doesn’t add anything about coming by, or them needing to talk.

Boyd shows up twenty minutes later, hair still wet from the shower, t-shirt sticking to his damp back.

“I should have called you,” Boyd says, before Raylan can utter a word. “I owe you an apology, Raylan. You extended me an offer of friendship, and I was regrettably slow to appreciate the full value of that offer.”

Raylan hasn’t thought about the mine robbery in days. Boyd edges a little closer, coming in front of his truck, and Raylan can read the hopeful expression on his face, the faint line of stubble at his jaw that he’d missed in his hurry to shave. A week ago Raylan would have already had Boyd’s jeans around his ankles and his dick in Raylan’s mouth.

Raylan doesn’t respond, and Boyd’s face falls. “Bowman was behind on the mortgage,” he confesses, sidling closer to Raylan sitting on the riverbank. “Ava was going to lose the house, without that money. But I can ask her to return it to me, and I can return it to Black Pike.”

Raylan rubs his temples, shakes his head. He doesn’t care about Black Pike. He should — Art would insist that it’s his job, but as far as Raylan’s concerned, it’s not his job to solve the problems of a company that’s responsible for half the graves dug in Harlan for the last fifty years — but mostly he’s relieved that Boyd only stole the money to pay off Ava’s house. Raylan has heard enough about _Winona’s_ mortgage, he doesn’t need to hear about Ava’s, too.

Boyd squats down beside him, like he’s still debating whether or not it’s safe to sit.

“Mags put something in the apple pie she gave me,” Raylan begins, because once he shot the taser out of Baines’s hand there was never any question about telling Boyd.

He doesn’t expect Boyd to grab his shoulders, twist him around get right up in his face.

“Raylan?” Boyd shakes him, sticks a finger in his eye and peels up his eyelid. “What’d she use?” Raylan frowns. How the hell is he supposed to know what hill magic Mags put into that brew? “ _Raylan_! I’m taking you to the hospital, but I don’t know how quick Mags’s poison works. You need to tell me what she used!”

“It’s not poison.” Raylan bats Boyd’s hands away from his eyes. “You asshole, I’m not dying. I’m pregnant.”

Boyd falls into the creek.

Raylan has been anticipating some sort of grandiose reaction — he grew up with Boyd, after all, he’d seen Boyd’s outsized indignation at the protests before they’d even started at the mines — but he was expecting something a little less wet. The creek isn’t very deep, though, so mostly Boyd soaks his ass and his boots and stares up at Raylan with his eyes and mouth in shocked, round ‘o’s.

Raylan sighs, rolls to his feet and stretches out a hand to help Boyd out of the creek. Boyd blinks at it for a few long seconds before folding his wet hand into Raylan’s and letting Raylan haul him up, the momentum bringing him against Raylan’s chest. He doesn’t move away.

(Raylan hasn’t let go of Boyd’s hand, either, but he’s pregnant and he just shot a man with a taser for unwittingly trying to solve that problem for him, so it could be argued that Raylan is not currently in his right mind. Maybe it’s the hormones.)

Boyd’s free hand slides down Raylan’s chest, comes to rest just above his belt, leaving damp fingerprints all down Raylan’s nice shirt. “You’re really...?” he says, hushed, head tilted so he can read the answer on Raylan’s haggard face, though he keeps dropping his gaze to stare at where his palm is pressed to Raylan’s stomach. His whole face is still slack with shock, suffused with a milder glow than Boyd usually emits. “A baby,” he whispers, the awe clear in his voice and his eyes and his smile smaller yet somehow brighter than Raylan had imagined it when he’d thought of telling Boyd.

“You ain’t got any questions about this whole thing?” Raylan wonders, leaning back and arching his brows instead of bending forward to press his mouth to Boyd’s parted lips.

He and Boyd have never been that kind of couple — they’ve never been any kind of couple, unless you count Aunt Helen calling them a couple of fucking idiots when they signed up for the mines, which was more accurate at the time than she’d probably realized — and Mags Bennett poisoning him ain’t changing that.

So he tries to distract them both from the discomfiture of the open adoration scrawled across Boyd’s face. “Like, how the hell did it happen? Or, is it yours? Or did you think that maybe I just told you so you could help me get rid of it?”

Raylan’s not getting rid of it. He knows that now. Boyd probably knows it, too, but the threat is enough to make him flinch, have his fingers press into layers of cotton against Raylan’s stomach, the hand in Raylan’s squeezing tight enough to bruise.

Then he looks at Raylan, his face still so goddamned open, vulnerable like Boyd isn’t meant to be, and his worry evaporates like mist under the summer sun. “You think I don’t know you, Raylan Givens?” he murmurs, starts grinning so wide Raylan expects Boyd’s cheeks to split from the strain. “You ain’t gonna hurt this baby.”

“Might hurt you,” Raylan mutters, “you don’t get that fool grin off your face.”

Boyd buries his grin in Raylan’s shoulder, and Raylan can feel him shake with laughter, doesn’t say anything when Boyd lifts his head and his eyes are a little too bright, his eyelashes damp. The man just fell in a creek, after all. His face must have gotten wet.

“A Givens baby,” Boyd says, like it hasn’t yet occurred to him that this apple pie fetus is half his. Like Raylan would be telling Boyd first no matter whose baby it was, and Boyd would have the right to rest his hand proprietarily on Raylan’s skin.

“Well,” Raylan contends, “if it’s down to my last name or yours, I suppose the kid is less likely to be gunned down as a Givens. But it’s a slim margin at best.”

“You’re a regular ray of sunshine,” Boyd declares with a roll of his eyes, but he’s smiling—smiling at _Raylan_ , finally, instead of grinning stupidly at Raylan’s flat stomach and the whole, wide world. “I do have one question, Raylan, if you don’t mind.”

“Boyd, you’d best not be asking if this damn baby is yours, or I’ll –”

Boyd tilts his head and kisses the rest of the words right out of Raylan’s mouth, sucks them off his bottom lip and licks away any that might have been left behind. “You gonna shut up long enough to hear the question?” he wonders, one hand pulling Raylan’s hair and the other landing possessively on Raylan’s ass. “Now, I was planning to be a gentleman and ask if you’d prefer that I ravished you on the riverbank or in the arguably drier and less rocky back of my truck, but if you’re gonna keep on with your bellyaching, Raylan, I think I’ll just take you right here.”

So he does. And if he goes a little too gently at first — well, that doesn’t last, and Raylan ain’t in much of a position to complain.


	3. Chapter 3

Boyd shows up at the motel two days later, the back of his truck filled with boxes labeled ‘Books’, carrying a duffel bag over one shoulder and smart enough to look mildly concerned about Raylan’s reaction to such an unforeseen turn of events.

Raylan slams the door in his face.

The door bounces off Boyd’s damn steel-toed mining boot and nearly catches Raylan in the nose.

“Boyd,” Raylan warns, watching Boyd through where he has the door cracked and refuses to open it and let Boyd in. “You go on back to Harlan, now. Me having your baby don’t give you the right to move into my motel.”

Boyd disagrees. Unfortunately, so does the motel owner, who happily rents Boyd the vacant room next door. By the end of the second day, Boyd has successfully covered Raylan’s entire bed with books, and that’s not counting all the shiny new baby books stacked up on the table and cutting off Winona’s drooping housewarming gift from the sun.

“Stop breaking into my room,” Raylan demands, though he’s not sure it carries much weight when he’s bent over a toilet and spitting saliva that tastes like bile. He’s not sure how it is for women, but in his case ‘morning sickness’ tends to show up around midnight and last until three. It’s likely that Mags orchestrated it this way, because getting Raylan pregnant wasn’t vengeance enough.

“Wouldn’t be breaking in if you gave me a key,” Boyd counters, voice low and still rough with sleep, their walls so thin that he’d come over as soon as he’d heard Raylan puke. He fills a plastic cup at the sink, soaks one of the dingy motel washcloths in cool water before setting it on the back of Raylan’s neck.

Raylan gives him the key. When he comes home from work that afternoon, it’s to find dinner waiting in styrofoam containers on the table and Boyd asleep in his bed, _What to Expect_ propped open on his bare chest.

Raylan eats Boyd’s share of their dinner without bothering to wake him, but he never asks Boyd to leave.

* * *

A few weeks later, Raylan goes to vet a courtroom for Reardon and finds his – finds Boyd in a suit and working security for Ms. Carol Johnson of Black Pike.

She’s not surprised that they know each other, because Ms. Johnson is the sort of well-groomed, well-armored woman who does her research.

Of course, there’s a whole county and then some that knows Raylan shot Boyd in the chest, so Raylan’s none too sure that’s any great feat on Ms. Johnson’s part. Raylan would be more impressed if she had known that he and Boyd had woken up together, Boyd wrapped like a vine around Raylan, Raylan woken before his alarm by the ticklish sensation of Boyd’s breath on his belly, Boyd chattering away at the deaf-mute tadpole living in Raylan’s gut.

Carol Johnson _doesn’t_ know that, though, and she might have dressed Raylan’s – Boyd in a suit but she didn’t see the sonogram picture in his wallet from an obstetrician’s appointment Boyd had insisted they attend yesterday afternoon.

(Boyd had wanted to go to a doctor in the hills, where doctors knew about such things as men having babies, and Raylan had refused to visit a doctor in Harlan where every person in the holler would hear about Arlo’s boy being pregnant by the next day. Raylan hadn’t wanted to visit a doctor at all — he was perfectly healthy, and if the strength of his nausea was any indication, the baby was perfectly heathy, too — and so they’d compromised and gone to some discreet charity clinic in Lexington.

Which had made Raylan’s afternoon, when Boyd had to threaten the woman with Raylan’s gun to make her take the appointment seriously, and then catch her when the baby’s heartbeat made her faint dead on the floor.)

“Baby, did you remember to eat lunch?” Boyd hisses, as soon as he’s strode right up to the judge’s bench and offered to help Raylan search for bombs. “You’re looking wan.”

Raylan shines the flashlight directly into Boyd’s eyes. “You’re about to look like an asshole with a bloody lip,” he threatens, “you keep commenting on my looks. Now what the hell are you really doing here?”

Boyd shrugs, cuts his gaze sideways to indicate the red-headed woman eyeing them both. “Ms. Johnson here requested my presence. And offered to pay me,” he adds, cocking his head, “which offer I gratefully accepted, as we will shortly be in need of more money than I believe either of us currently bring in.”

“And here I thought you’d just rob another bank,” Raylan replies, smirking when he sees he’s made Boyd smile. It’s not quite as wide as Carol Johnson makes him smile, though, when she calls them a love story.

“We’ve been called worse,” Raylan admits, and feels the warmth of Boyd’s gaze on him all the way out the courtroom doors.

* * *

Winona finds out first. Or fourth, Raylan supposes, if you count Mags knowing all along. She comes over to beg Raylan out for dinner and company, and Raylan might have forgotten to lock the door when he came home and found Boyd with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his collar unbuttoned, the dregs of a good bourbon lingering on his lips. Raylan thinks anyone would have forgotten to lock the door, if they’d come home to Boyd Crowder looking like that.

So, first, Winona finds out that her ex-husband is sleeping with another man.

(“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” she screeches, once Raylan and Boyd have thrown their clothes on and splashed water on their flushed cheeks.

“Didn’t think I needed to,” Raylan answers. “Thought you already knew it’s polite to _knock_.”

Winona hits him with her purse. Boyd downs a shot of Raylan’s whiskey in short order, but Raylan thinks it’s less for his nerves and more to keep from laughing at Winona’s high-pitched fury.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you like men!”

“I didn’t think it was important,” Raylan confesses, feels Boyd come up behind him, the weight of his hand on Raylan’s hip like a second gun. “Seeing as it’s just the one, and I think he was busy with a stint in Alderson when I proposed.”

“Never too busy for you, Raylan,” Boyd counters, then offers Winona a full glass of whiskey before she’s managed to close her mouth.)

Second, she finds out that either Raylan has taken up reading with a heretofore unsuspected passion, or the other man has also moved in.

(“He lives here?” Winona asks, her expression caught somewhere between shock at discovering her ex-husband’s lover is also sharing his home, and pity that anyone would be forced to stoop to Raylan’s low standards of living.

Raylan lifts one shoulder, glowers at Boyd. “That wasn’t my decision,” he says firmly, and elbows Boyd when he tries to lean in for a kiss. “But I’ve put down rat traps and sprayed the place with Raid, and he ain’t gone yet.”)

There are baby books everywhere, but they’re in piles with French novels and guides on skinning deer and making sausage and a vegetarian cookbook — Raylan thinks Boyd might have a problem saying no to books — and Winona is too preoccupied boggling at them to notice Boyd’s reading choices, or to add one and one and get three.

She gets suspicious when they go out to dinner and Raylan declines a drink, but foolishly ascribes that to Boyd’s good influence and lets it slide. Then Boyd recruits her help in forcing Raylan out of the motel and into an apartment. She comes over waving a sheaf of listings, and Raylan asks if she’s found any with space for a nursery.

Winona does not faint, because Raylan wouldn’t have married her if she were the sort of woman who swooned upon discovering that her ex-husband and his male lover were becoming parents. Of course, she’s also a clean-cut suburban girl from Louisville and not a hillbilly familiar with Harlan witchcraft, so she does sit down rather abruptly when Raylan and Boyd explain that no, they’re not adopting — not that any agency with standards would _allow_ them to walk away with a kid — but going the far more dangerous route of mixing genetic material and hoping for the best.

“So you’re telling me that _Raylan_ is .... having a baby?” Winona sputters, sitting on the bed and clutching her color printouts of all the overpriced apartments Gary thinks they should view. (Gary, Raylan suspects, was more than happy to help once he learned that the prospective apartment was for Raylan and _some man named Boyd Crowder_ , and not Raylan and their mutual ex-wife.)

“Do you want to see the sonogram?” Boyd asks, smiling, already reaching into his pocket for his wallet and the strange, black and white photo of the primordial swamp creature swimming through Raylan’s organs. Raylan is fairly certain that if he hadn’t forbidden Boyd from telling anyone that picture would be posted on every telephone pole from Lexington to the Tennessee line. Yesterday, Raylan had come out of the office to find Boyd showing the picture to Rick, the homeless man who lives across the street from the courthouse, extolling his “wife’s” virtues with a shit-eating grin.

Winona holds the sonogram picture like it might bite her. Raylan understands that: he’d stared at it upside-down, for a while, and thought if he connected the squiggly lines it looked sort of like a snake.

Boyd pours them a couple of glasses of celebratory bourbon from Raylan’s dwindling stash, and if Raylan kisses the smile off his face, after, it’s only because he misses the taste of a good bourbon on his tongue.

Celebratory bourbon does not make finding an apartment more enjoyable for any of them. Winona has developed a valid, if somewhat belated, mistrust of realtors, and Raylan has scared three of them away by announcing that he’s pregnant and needs to puke. (As it is not between midnight and three am when they view apartments, Raylan does not actually need to puke, but he does enjoy watching the blood drain out of their carefully made-up faces, and it gives Boyd several opportunities to pull out his wallet and fawn over the tadpole they’ve made.)

“I don’t know why the hell I agreed to this,” Winona says, slumped over the kitchen island in the fifth place they view that day, the realtor already frightened away and hiding in her car.

“Good place to meet your third husband,” Raylan suggests, sipping his decaf coffee and wishing he was at the office where Boyd wasn’t around to keep him from a goddamn cup of caffeine.

Boyd wanders back in from the second bedroom — more accurately the hall closet, no way in hell Raylan is putting a kid in there, even if it is Boyd’s — leans against the counter so his arm brushes against Raylan’s, and Raylan doesn’t push him away.

“I had hoped you’d know how to handle Raylan, having been his wife for six years,” Boyd says to Winona, tipping his head to indicate Raylan, leaving it to rest on Raylan’s shoulder because Boyd is a lazy fucker. A lazy fucker who is not above staking his claim, even if there’s no one around to warn off but Raylan’s ex-wife. Raylan snorts, and forces the rest of his tepid decaf coffee into Boyd’s hands. “Didn’t you convince him to buy a house once before?”

Winona lifts her head off the island, propping her chin on the granite countertop and glaring at Boyd. “Look here, Boyd Crowder,” she mumbles, waving her finger tiredly in Boyd’s direction. “I don’t care if you are some criminal with a gun –”

“You brought your gun?” Raylan interrupts, because he and Boyd had _talked_ about that, dammit. “You know it’s illegal for you to have a gun. You said you’d leave it at home!”

Boyd scowls. Raylan can feel it, against his shoulder, but Winona continues speaking before he can explain to Raylan just why he felt it necessary to bring an illegal firearm to an open house.

“- you don’t have any idea what it takes to convince Raylan Givens to buy a goddamn house.”

“Winona,” Raylan explains, keeps his voice low, murmurs the words into Boyd’s cloud of hair, “had the sense not to bring me along until it was time to sign the papers. I expect she passed the time by checking out the realtors and testing the beds.”

Winona throws her purse at Raylan’s head, but fortunately Boyd seems to think Raylan and their tadpole are made of glass, and he catches it before it bruises Raylan’s jaw.

“I don’t see why we can’t just stay where we are,” Raylan complains. “Rent the room next door, once the baby’s born, and put it there.”

Boyd hits him in the chest with Winona’s purse.

* * *

They take Winona out to dinner, because none of them can cook, and continue to argue the necessity of moving out of the motel for another ten days.

(“Raylan, did you anticipate raising this child in a dresser drawer? Or leaving it with Carlotta, the maid, where it can chew on the dirty towels and play with the soaps?”

“I don’t see why not,” Raylan replies, though he’s more than a little preoccupied working Boyd out of his jeans. “It’d give the kid on the job training and teach ‘em Spanish at the same time. Hell of a lot cheaper than daycare, at any rate.”)

Raylan comes home on the tenth day to find all the books pushed off the table and Boyd sitting there staring at a map of Green Mountain and pulling out his hair. “There’s something here, Raylan,” he mutters, when Raylan leans down to kiss Boyd’s temple while he unknots his tie, doesn’t realize he’s done it until Boyd presses a soft hand to Raylan’s stomach and murmurs, “Hey, darlings,” like it’s something they’ve done for years.

“You mean besides the mountain you’re trying to blow up?” Raylan retorts, tossing his hat on top of the TV and dropping his tie onto the map that has Boyd so enraptured, a coil of black silk disrupting all Boyd’s careful notes and lines.

Boyd cocks his head and stares at Raylan’s tie circling the mountain. Claps his hands and shouts, kicks over his chair as he leaps up to sweep Raylan into a kiss. The kiss deepens, lingers, finishes with them naked and panting on the polyester bedspread, Boyd resting on his elbows with Raylan’s cock still up his ass.

“You did it, baby,” Boyd gasps, and Raylan’s not sure if Boyd’s referring to the map of Green Mountain or Raylan’s unparalleled ability to fuck Boyd Crowder blind. “You figured it out.”

He kisses Raylan again, sloppy and deep, and Raylan lets him, runs his hands down Boyd’s sweaty back and thinks that they can do it again before bed. Thinks about the fact that Boyd will be there at midnight when Raylan wakes up to kneel over the toilet for three hours, and that he’s been in Raylan’s bed for almost a month and talks everyday about finding a place, putting both their names on the lease.

(Symbolically, Raylan hopes. He’s pretty sure no one will rent them an apartment if they run Boyd Crowder’s name for a credit check.)

“Let’s buy a house,” Raylan says, before he can think to hold it in, hopes maybe it was too quiet for Boyd to hear.

Boyd lights up like a Fourth of July sky after dark, peppers Raylan’s face with kisses like he’d just proposed instead of suggesting that they make a good decision about finances and equity. “I’m about to make us a fucking mint,” he promises, doesn’t appear fazed by Raylan’s suspicious look. “I’ll buy us a fucking _mansion_ , Raylan. I’ll buy you the whole damn state.”

* * *

Boyd fucks over Carol Johnson, Black Pike, and Green Mountain with admirable efficiency, and nets them more than enough money to buy a house in Miami, much less in the bucolic suburbs of Lexington.

Raylan catches the tail end of Boyd’s conversation with Mags and intuits that his lover has fucked over the Bennett matriarch as well, because Boyd has his head jutting forward like a rattlesnake about to strike, and Mags don’t look none too pleased.

“What did you do to Mags?” Raylan asks, once Carol Johnson has stomped off to Raylan’s car, face flushed to match her hair and suddenly impatient with the crowd of hillbillies she’d been so eager to woo.

Raylan ain’t worried about Boyd pissing off the likes of Carol Johnson, but he angered Mags Bennett nearly twenty-five years ago and he’s just paying the price now, so he’s more than a little concerned about what vengeance she might whip up given another decade or so to stew.

Boyd crowds Raylan up against the back of the Bennett house, still vibrating with his recent triumph, runs his hands roughly down Raylan’s sides and grinds his erection into Raylan’s hip.

“I merely reminded her that she was to thank for continuing our family lines,” Boyd tells him, biting his jaw and groaning when Raylan relents and rubs Boyd’s cock through the thin fabric of his suit. “And that she might wish to contribute to our child’s future now, instead of paying for it later.”

Raylan laughs out loud, kisses Boyd hard with the grin still on his face. He’d told Mags she would regret what she’d done. She hadn’t believed him, then, but no one in Harlan wanted a feud with the Crowders, and Mags had bound them to the Givenses with blood.

“I might love you, you asshole,” Raylan murmurs low in Boyd’s ear, and jacks him off behind the Bennett’s house, hiding like teenagers in the trees.

* * *

Art finds the change of address forms Raylan has to file once they’ve moved into the new house. Which isn’t too bad — Art’s been harassing Raylan about moving to someplace that makes him seem less like a truck stop hooker or a serial killer — but the change of address forms prompt Art to check Raylan’s other paperwork, and so he also discovers that Raylan has changed his ICE.

“ _Boyd_ fucking _Crowder!_ ”

The entire office stops working. They all stare, transfixed, as Raylan’s boss slams his fist and the sheet of paper Raylan had filed with his emergency contact information into the glass top of Raylan’s desk.

“If you wind up in the hospital, you want us to call _Boyd_ _Crowder_?”

Raylan leans back in his office chair, swings his feet up onto his desk and peers at Art. “Are you asking,” he wonders slowly, “because you’re planning on putting me there? Or is this just idle curiosity on your part?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Art declares stridently, still shouting, but at least he’s stopped waving his fists. Raylan likes Leslie Mullen, and he would feel bad if Boyd killed her husband for punching Raylan. “You’d better explain to me why, in the unfortunate circumstance of you being shot, you want us to phone a man who’s tried to shoot you!”

Raylan sighs, swings his boots off the desk and comes to his feet, gesturing Art back toward the man’s office. If he’s going to explain this, he’s explaining it to Art and not to the whole of the Eastern Kentucky Marshals force.

“He never tried to shoot _me_ ,” Raylan points out, as they’re walking to Art’s office. “He was trying to shoot Ava, who was more than likely trying to shoot him.”

“He shot a man in the back of the head,” Art counters, “then dumped him off a bridge.”

Raylan wrinkles his nose, lifts one shoulder. That’s true enough. “Wasn’t a very nice man, though. And Boyd ain’t all that strong. He probably couldn’t have dumped anyone in the river without a little help.”

He closes Art’s glass door, doesn’t bother with the blinds. He also doesn’t go for Art’s alcohol cabinet, and that’s enough to trip Art’s suspicions that something is wrong.

“He robs banks. He blew a man up in a meth lab.”

“I shot a man over crab cakes on a rooftop bar,” Raylan replies. “We’ve all done things other folks didn’t much like.” He doesn’t want to sit down, but he’s tired: he’s been hoping that would pass now that he’s sleeping through the night, but he wakes up nearly as exhausted as he was when he fell asleep. Boyd says it’s normal, and Raylan figures Boyd’s read enough books on the subject to know. “And he stopped robbing banks over a year ago. He’s gone straight.”

Art sighs gustily, and sits on the edge of his desk so that he can hover over Raylan. “Explain it to me in small words, Ray-Ray, so I can understand. Why’d you put Boyd Crowder as your ICE?”

Raylan’s lips twist into a half-smile without his permission. He readjusts his hat, smiles at his fingers where they’re resting on the slight, inconspicuous curve of his belly. “We’re madly in love,” he declares nonchalantly, rubs his thumb over the place Boyd whispers secrets to their tiny, apple pie spawn. “I’m having Boyd’s baby. He bought me a house.”

Art throws up his hands. “Goddammit, Raylan, if you’re not going to take this seriously –”

“It’s a nice house. Winona helped pick it out. She’s offered to decorate the nursery, but I’m not sure there’s any point, since Boyd’s already stacked an entire children’s library in the room and no one can see the walls.” Raylan cocks his head, thoughtful. “But I don’t know. Maybe it would be nice, having ducklings and bunny rabbits and ABCs stenciled on the walls. I liked Winnie the Pooh, as a kid. Boyd wants a mobile with the solar system — Boyd wanted to be an astronaut, before the _Challenger_ blew — but the only one he’s found so far is for _Star Wars_ , and I don’t need our kid expecting Han Solo and getting me instead.”

He doesn’t mind the solar system, though. He hasn’t told Boyd, but he’s already bought a nightlight for the nursery that replicates the night sky. It was Boyd who first taught Raylan the constellations, seven years old and spending the night with the Crowders because Arlo and Bo had business and Frances had been hiding out at Nobles Holler for days. Raylan could find even the dimmest stars and Boyd could connect them to Greek names and legends that had lived and died far beyond the jagged black line of their hills.

Art stares at Raylan for a breath. Blinks, and exhales. Does it again. “You’re not joking,” he finally says, choking on the impossibility of what Raylan’s said. “What the hell, Raylan?”

Raylan grins. “It’s a really nice house,” he confesses, because it _is_. It would be even nicer if he could prevent Boyd from baby-proofing all the drawers months before they even have a kid, but, seeing as how Raylan got the king-sized bed and the hot tub, that’s a sacrifice Raylan is willing to make. “You’d probably sleep with Boyd, too, if he bought you this house.”

“And would I wind up pregnant?” Art wonders sarcastically, folding his arms and glaring skeptically down at Raylan.

“Now that would depend on whether or not you’d pissed off Mags Bennett, I suppose.”

Art and Leslie come for dinner later that week, and Raylan and Boyd successfully shatter two glass pans and nearly shoot each other before surrendering to the inevitable and ordering takeout from the steakhouse a mile away. “How are we supposed to feed a child,” Boyd laments, sweeping up the glass while Raylan heads for the door, “if we can’t manage a home cooked meal where nobody gets shot?”

“I always thought that’s what McDonald’s was for,” Raylan replies, and goes to pick up their food.

 

He’s not sure if the dinner convinces Art he’s actually pregnant or just that he and Boyd are both crazy, considering Boyd framed the most recent sonogram picture and hung it in the front hall, and Raylan’s wearing sweatpants because it’s getting downright impossible to button his jeans.

“How’s your nausea?” Leslie wonders, cupping Raylan’s hand between hers and patting it in commiseration, as if Raylan’s taken Winona’s role in their dinners simply because he’s growing a Crowder in a uterus he didn’t have the last time they met. Raylan widens his eyes and sends Boyd a silent cry for help, but Art’s got Boyd pinned in the corner where he’s pouring drinks, and he returns Raylan’s plea with interest.

“Why don’t we eat?” Raylan replies, offering his arm to Leslie and glaring at Art. Boyd polishes off the tumblers of bourbon he’d poured for their guests, but he follows Raylan bravely into the dining room.

“Now don’t take this the wrong way, Raylan,” Leslie says, once Boyd’s poured the wine and Raylan’s dished out the steaks and Leslie’s complimented the mashed potatoes that neither of them made. “But you’re the first pregnant man I’ve ever met. When Art told me you were pregnant, I thought he meant you and Winona, but with Winona carrying the baby!”

Boyd’s fingers tighten on his steak knife, though Raylan doesn’t think their guests notice, since they’re too busy blinking under the glare of his broad grin. (Boyd ain’t possessive, exactly, except for when he is.)

“Why, ma’am, that’s a perfectly understandable reaction.” Boyd smiles at her, amicable, _charming_ , and Raylan amuses himself by watching Art scowl. His boss had met Boyd the preacher, and Boyd the racist asshole, but this is his first introduction to the Boyd Crowder that smiled and teased and cajoled his way under Jenna Wright’s cheerleading skirt.

Boyd explains — as best he can, because neither he nor Raylan had seen a Harlan man pregnant in their lifetimes up till now — the hill magic that has led to Raylan’s current condition. Then he tries to show them the sonogram video. Raylan’s taken to telling random grocery cashiers that they’re having a child, just so Boyd can pull out that damn picture and beam.

Leslie coos over the poorly defined squiggles that compose the first Crowder likely to be born in forty years. Art appears to be less impressed, sets his fork down and crosses his arms.

“So,” he says, voice slow and deliberate, the way he spoke to a Glynco recruit who’d forgotten to clean his gun, “you’re telling me that some woman gave you a sip of moonshine, and this magical alcohol knocked you up?”

“More or less,” Raylan agrees, because saying that _Boyd_ knocked him up seems redundant at this point in the conversation.

“And you thought, in your infinite wisdom –” Art is louder, now, cheeks red with anger as well as wine. “- you thought the best man to father your child was the felon with ‘skin head’ tattooed on his hands?”

“ _Arthur_!” Leslie hisses through her teeth, as though she could slap her husband’s ringing condemnation back into his mouth. Of course, she’s also staring at Boyd’s fingers. Boyd lifts his chin, and doesn’t move to cover his hands.

“Chief Deputy, your concerns are duly noted.” Boyd is speaking calmly, his shoulders thrown back and his chest puffed out, because Boyd’s daddy never taught him how to curl away from a blow the way Raylan’s did. “I am not unaware of my own failings, sir, but I also cannot change the past.”

Boyd glances over at Raylan then, decades of gunpowder and coal and Harlan dirt swirling in his brown eyes, and Raylan thinks that Boyd wouldn’t change the past even if he could, at least not the parts of it that Raylan remembers best.

“And, though I understand your –”

“There’s nobody in the whole goddamned world that’s gonna love this kid more than Boyd is,” Raylan interrupts, throws his napkin on the table and takes a bracing gulp of Boyd’s drink. Leslie and Art jump, startled by his vehemence. Boyd’s mouth hangs open, but he ought not to be surprised that Raylan’s known this much all along. “And it don’t matter to him that it’s half his — it’s enough for him that it’s a kid and that it’s mine. And so it don’t matter to me if he’s got slurs tattooed across his fucking forehead, because there’s nobody I’d rather have raising this kid than him.” He finishes Boyd’s bourbon, hopes the tadpole’s getting drunk because one of them should, slams the glass back down on the table and revels in Art’s wince. “And you, you don’t get a goddamned say in any of it, so either shut your damn mouth and be happy for us or get the hell out of our house.”

Leslie’s gone pale but for the layer of blush on her cheeks, and Art is gaping across the table at Raylan like he’s never seen him before in his life. Raylan huffs, breathing hard and aching to throw the empty glass at the floor just to listen to it break.

Boyd takes this option away from him when he rises to his feet, snatches the glass from Raylan’s hands and bends to press his lips to Raylan’s cheek. It’s less a kiss than it is a means for Boyd to hide his mile-wide grin. “Raylan Givens, you’re better than fireworks,” he whispers, then straightens up and tells the silent room he’s going to refill his drink and start some coffee, though it’ll have to be decaf, because that’s all they have in the house.

Nobody says anything while he’s gone: Art stares at Raylan and Leslie stares at her plate and Raylan focuses on breathing because it would be insane to hit his boss for insulting Boyd Crowder, who assuredly deserves far worse. Almost as insane as it would be to defend Boyd’s honor, or have his kid. Raylan rubs the bridge of his nose and wishes for a moment that they were living in the 1950s and he could have a second drink.

“This looks delicious!” Leslie chirrups brightly, when Boyd comes back in with his drink and a tiramisu that the steakhouse recommended for dessert. “It must be so nice to have a man around who can cook,” she tells Raylan, and he struggles to nod instead of laughing until his stomach cramps. When Raylan asked Boyd earlier what the hell went into tiramisu, Boyd had poked it and guessed “Cool Whip with coffee grounds sprinkled on top? How the hell should I know what rich people eat?”

Raylan offers to go get the coffee, escapes into the kitchen and returns just in time to hear Leslie moan over her mouthful of tiramisu, swallow, and say, “So have you boys given any thought as to baby names?”

It’s unfortunate that Raylan likes Leslie so much — they had dinner almost every week in Glynco, the four of them and whichever of the Mullen kids was home — because if he didn’t, he’d be sorely tempted to dump the full pot of coffee on her head. The last thing this evening needs is Boyd discussing baby names.

“Mmm,” Boyd hums, around his bite of Cool Whip and coffee grounds, nods vigorously in response. “We have! I’m partial to Hephzibah, myself.”

Raylan groans. Leslie’s gaze darts between him and Boyd, clearly trying to figure out if Boyd is kidding. “Um,” she replies hesitantly. “For, um ... for a boy or a girl?” she asks, because Art’s wife is a good Southern girl and was raised to be polite, especially when conversing with crazy people who trawl the Bible for baby names.

“Neither,” Raylan announces, setting the coffee pot on an empty plate with a clang, brushing his fingers over the tattoos on the back of Boyd’s hand. Boyd lets him tangle their fingers together, smiles when Raylan’s thumb rubs at the ‘s’ of his prison ink. Art’s watching, and Raylan resists the urge to lift Boyd’s hand to his mouth, to suck on his fingers in a demonstration of just how much it doesn’t bother him that the man in his bed comes with his past, is covered in coal scars and prison marks and bullet wounds, that Boyd wears all the pieces of Harlan that Raylan meant to leave behind. “We’re having some sort of bulbous-headed river eel. Didn’t you see the sonogram?”

Leslie decides that taking a very large bite of tiramisu is the best of her available options. Boyd rolls his eyes and heaves a mighty sigh, but he also squeezes Raylan’s hand. Art shakes his head and snorts out a reluctant laugh, and Raylan sips his decaf coffee and thinks maybe having guests over for dinner ain’t so bad.

* * *

Of course, that doesn’t extend to _being_ guests.

“We’re not having dinner at Ava’s!” he says, for the fifth time that afternoon. Boyd turns up the radio — and Raylan could do without three hours of political commentary and book reviews, though he’ll admit that it would be mildly amusing to tell Art that Boyd listens to the same NPR programming that Art and Leslie enjoy — and continues driving south on the interstate, out of civilization and over the Harlan County line. “The last time we went to Ava’s I _shot_ you!”

Boyd looks over at Raylan, raises one eyebrow. “And what, Raylan, you’re blaming that on her fried chicken? You’re worried it will compel you to shoot me again?”

“This is a terrible idea,” Raylan insists, though admittedly he’s less worried about Ava’s fried chicken and more concerned about her reckless trigger finger and loaded shotgun. “Might I remind you that Ava doesn’t much care for me?”

Boyd waves this valid concern away and takes the exit for the state road heading east into the hills.

Raylan sighs. “We’re already shopping for strollers with my ex-wife this weekend,” he whines, though that was Raylan’s idea. They get fewer odd looks at the baby stores when Winona tags along, and Boyd’s no help, trying to rub Raylan’s protruding belly in public where anyone could see. Raylan threatened to break his hand, after the last time. It’s bad enough that Raylan’s had to buy larger jeans, wear them low like a man cultivating a beer gut. Last thing he needs is Boyd drawing attention to the belly Raylan’s taken pains to hide. “Why is it so important to you that we befriend everyone who’s ever been near my dick?”

“Raylan, you know how much I enjoy gathering folks around me who espouse interests similar to my own.” Boyd winks at Raylan, then turns his attention back to swerving around the scattering of potholes down the road. “But it just so happens,” he continues, “that this dinner is not about you or your dick.” Boyd pauses, taps his fingers against the steering wheel and frowns. “Well, not entirely about your dick, at any rate.”

NPR fades in and out over the speakers, so Raylan switches it over to the emo rock cd Boyd had left in when he’d driven Raylan to the obstetrician yesterday afternoon. Thankfully, she hasn’t fainted since their first appointment, though she keeps checking Raylan over with undue thoroughness. She declared yesterday that they would make a fantastic journal article, and Boyd had made an aborted grab at Raylan’s gun.

“What’s it about, then?” he wonders, because Boyd wouldn’t insist on spending six hours in the car without some cause. “You craving food that ain’t burgers and Chinese?”

Maybe nobody else would notice — nobody left alive, at least — but Raylan sees the shutters closing in Boyd’s eyes, watches him smooth out the sparks and twists of his expression and stare blankly at the road. But Raylan’s seen Boyd pretend not to care about things before; and it’s getting easier everyday they wake up together to believe that Boyd’s every expression isn’t part of some long, nefarious con.

“Kid doesn’t have a lot of family,” Boyd explains, lightly, as if he weren’t at all bothered that their small river eel had three grandparents and one uncle dead already, and the world would be better for it if the last granddaddy keeled over, too. “I thought we might introduce Baby Eliphalet to his Aunt Ava, so he knows where to go when his daddies act like the assholes that they are.”

“First of all,” Raylan replies, pressing his hands over the bump of his stomach to cover the kid’s ears. “We are not encouraging _any_ child to run away to Harlan, much less _our_ child. Second, you don’t know that it’s a boy; and third, I don’t care if it’s an alien parasite come to take over the world, we are not calling it _Eliphalet_.”

Raylan doesn’t bother to address the part about them being assholes: it’s true, after all, and he doesn’t expect fatherhood to transform them into the Huxtables. Or even into the Clampetts.

“Eliphalet is a perfectly respectable name. He was your great-great-granddaddy, wasn’t he, and a hero in the war against Britain?”

Raylan rolls his eyes. “He sold liquor to both sides and then stole their horses once they were drunk on moonshine,” he amends, though Boyd’s right that doing so had made Eliphalet Givens a hero to the illegal squatters living west of the Virginia line. “We ain’t naming the baby after a thief.”

Boyd opens his mouth, but Raylan can see his eyes sparkling, and cuts him off before he can suggest naming their tadpole after a murderer instead. “We ain’t naming the baby after anybody who’s so much as breathed the air in Harlan,” he says firmly. “We ain’t calling it Bowman or Bo or Frances, or Everett like my uncle, or even Isom like his favorite hog.”

“But that was a prize hog, Raylan,” Boyd argues, laughing. He grins at Raylan, still chuckling, and Raylan can see him remembering them at eleven years old, stupid and bored and thinking they were invincible until they’d tumbled into Isom’s pen. He remembers grabbing Boyd’s skinny arm and running, slipping in the muck and rolling under the fence, Boyd’s eyes and teeth the only white specks in his mud-coated face as he’d waved his fists and cussed out the angry hog.

Good lord, Raylan thinks, their child’s going to get itself killed before it reaches first grade.

“What about Casper?” Boyd asks once he’s stopped laughing, and it worries Raylan that Boyd seems to be seriously asking him to name their child _Casper Crowder_. “That’s a nice, strong name.”

“That’s a _ghost_ ,” Raylan retorts, his voice higher than it usually goes. “And _no_. Not Casimir either, I’ve seen your list.”

“Cassiopeia?” Boyd returns, and Raylan covers his eyes.

“You want to name your prospective daughter after a woman who’s spending eternity with her skirts up around her head?”

“You’re so finicky, Raylan. I’m sure our prospective daughter can decide for herself where she’d like her skirts.”

Raylan frowns. “She’ll be deciding to keep them where they belong, or I’ll decide it for her.” Or he’ll just shoot any boy that stands too close. That’s another option to keep on the table. “Besides, what’s wrong with the names I suggested?”

“Laura? Melissa? Katie? Raylan, we are not naming a child after any of the numerous women you have bedded in your illustrious career.”

“I didn’t –”

Actually, come to think of it, Raylan does vaguely recall sleeping with a woman named Katie, a few too many mojitos into celebrating his recent divorce. It’s really for the best that Boyd interrupts.

“And we are not raising a racehorse, either, so no, we ain’t naming him Starchild of the Wind.”

“That was _Tim’s_ suggestion, because I told him I was making a list of characters for a book! What the hell else could I do but write it down?”

“Well, we could nickname him ‘Star’.”

“I think Starchild can talk to gentle forest creatures, if it helps?” Raylan offers, and they spend the rest of the ride narrating the adventures of Starchild of the Wind as he makes his way through the enchanted wood.

* * *

Starchild’s adventures in no way prepare Raylan to wind up on Ava’s doorstep and announce his pregnancy, but there they are all the same. The good news is that she’s a Harlan girl, and so — unlike Winona, Art, Leslie, or their obstetrician — she ought to believe them once they deliver the news.

Assuming she doesn’t shoot Raylan for showing up at her house.

“Boyd. Raylan.” Ava nods at them both, sitting on her porch with a cigarette. She tips her head back to study Raylan, arches a brow as she eyes him up and down. “Living with Boyd seems to suit you, Raylan. You’ve gotten fat.”

“I’m pregnant,” Raylan huffs, too incensed to think about working up to that news slowly and with a little more tact. “Though it’s still Boyd’s fault, I guess, even if he can’t cook for shit.”

Ava’s other eyebrow lifts. “Guess I don’t need to offer you a drink, then,” she says, pursing her lips and blowing smoke off to the side, away from Raylan.

“I could use a drink,” Boyd volunteers, raising his hand, his other arm settled loosely around Raylan’s waist. “If you’re handing them out.”

“Bourbon’s on the counter.” Ava waves him inside and Boyd goes, leaving Raylan with his – Boyd’s sister-in-law. Former sister-in-law? “You went to a hill witch?” she asks, once the screen door’s clattered shut.

“Yes, but not in search of this particular end.” Raylan rests against the porch rail, tips his hat to shade his face from the setting sun. “Mags dosed her apple pie.”

Ava nods, looking unsurprised. “She know you were sleeping with Boyd?”

“She did not. If she had, I believe she would have shown a glimmer of wisdom and poisoned me instead.”

Ava finishes her cigarette, peering past Raylan and into the trees, the county golden in the late afternoon light. “Are you happy?” she finally asks, just as the floorboards creak and Boyd’s boots herald his return, a bourbon and a glass of ice water for Raylan.

Boyd hands Raylan the water, his fingers slipping on the sweaty glass. Boyd’s wearing one of his black button-down shirts — his stereotypical villain’s attire, Raylan calls it, but he appreciates the way it settles on Boyd’s shoulders, appreciates even more that Boyd’s rolled up his sleeves — and a dark pair of jeans they bought last week, shopping for clothes that might fit Raylan. His hair’s combed into some semblance of order, and he’s older than Raylan’s ever imagined either of them being, but he looks younger than he has in a year, the haggard edges smoothed from his face.

Boyd smiles at Raylan, Raylan sips his water, and Ava watches them both while lighting a fresh cigarette.

“I might be,” he admits, before tilting his head way back to gulp down the rest of the water, doesn’t need to see Boyd to feel the heat of his gaze on the line of Raylan’s neck.

Ava snorts, shakes her head, and steals the bourbon out of Boyd’s hand.

 

Dinner goes better than any of them have any right to expect, considering the last one ended with Boyd bleeding out on the floor and Raylan closer to tears than anyone but Ava would ever know.

After her second drink, Ava says that she doesn’t understand why Winona’s been banned from suggesting baby names, and what’s wrong with naming a kid Cody, anyway? She finds herself summarily banned from suggesting baby names and Raylan tells her if she approves the name _Casey_ she’s uninvited from dinner at their house next week.

It turns out that one of the reasons Boyd was so determined to bring them to Ava’s was in the hopes that she could create a line of maternity wear for someone uninterested in donning polka-dotted muumuus, shapeless dresses, or shirts that said “coming soon!” on the front. (“I could wear one, too,” Boyd offered, with a grin, and Rayan informed him that if he did, the only coming Boyd would be doing anytime soon would involve his own right hand.)

Ava insists on taking measurements — and Raylan could have done without knowing exactly how many inches this new Crowder is adding to his waistline — and on taking Boyd’s money for fabric, but she promises to have something in a week or two, which is good, because the buttons on Raylan’s shirts are near popping and Tim and Rachel keep staring at his expanding stomach when they think he can’t see.

Raylan drives them home, because Boyd is somewhat the better for three glasses of bourbon, and Boyd falls asleep and starts snoring before they cross the county line. He’s twisted sideways in his seat — Raylan suspects that Boyd himself is part river eel, which would explain the creature he’s incubating — and half facing Raylan, knees and hands and nose all pointed at the driver’s seat, this man built from pieces of the luminous, dangerous boy Raylan left behind.

He shakes his head, reaches out and brushes Boyd’s dark hair off of his forehead, rests his hand on Boyd’s knee. Passes the county line and thinks about being sixteen and shooting holes in the sign, aiming for the center of the ‘r’ in ‘Harlan’.

 _You’re having a baby with Boyd Crowder_ , he wants to tell that pimpled, terrified kid, and laugh at the boy’s shock. _You’re living in the suburbs, with an ice cream truck and neighbors who bring you expensive wine and think it’s normal to discuss stocks and none of them have ever seen a still. Boyd’s repurposed the second guest room as a library, and his nightstand — he has a_ nightstand _, and a side of the bed — is covered with books, same as his truck was when he used to drive you home from baseball practice, or the mines._

Sixteen-year-old Raylan would have keeled over, at this point, and Raylan’s not sure if it would be the knowledge that he’d be outed as a queer that would do it, or hearing that one day he’d be playing house with _Boyd Crowder_ and a white picket fence.

 _He smiles a lot more than he ever did_ , Raylan wants to tell the angry, tangled up boy that he’d been, but that boy won’t believe him for another twenty-four years.

Boyd mutters something in his sleep, because there’s never been a silence Boyd wasn’t eager to fill; and Raylan smiles, drives away from the pimply, raging boy with the hunched shoulders and the old .22, and focuses on the road home.


	4. Chapter 4

Boyd gets hired working demolition, which Raylan vociferously decries as a terrible idea. He is shut down by Boyd’s rebuttal that his other skill sets lie in robbing banks, shooting people, and training white supremacists, and would Raylan prefer to raise their child on his own after locking Boyd up for committing felonies?

“Is that a confession?” Raylan asks him while he’s unbuttoning Boyd’s shirt, and in response Boyd leaves dynamite and concrete dust smeared down his shirt and over the zipper of his slacks.

Boyd having a job means that he’s not home when Art phones the house because Raylan’s phoned him, because you have to call your boss when you shoot a man, even if that man’s an asshole and an idiot who’s better off dead.

“Boyd’s gonna kill you,” Art says, before he hangs up, and has the gall to sound amused.

He also has the gall to swing by the site where Boyd’s been working and pick him up before driving to Harlan and agreeing that yes, Coover Bennett looks quite dead, and so does the man from the mineshaft that is probably Walt McCready.

“What the _hell_ were you thinking?” Boyd hollers, and every law enforcement agent crawling through the woods stops to watch the tableau unfolding by the mine shaft, Boyd Crowder spitting flames and Raylan Givens ducking under his hat and holding up his hands. “No, really, Raylan, I would like to know what the fuck possessed you to –”

“Do my job?” Raylan interrupts, meeting Boyd head on. “Save Loretta McCready’s life?”

“Try and get yourself killed!” Boyd fires back, his hands splayed over the slight curve of Raylan’s belly, rubbing his thumbs over it to either reassure the baby or himself. “Jesus Christ,” he whispers, face chalk white, and Raylan feels regret swell in his chest for the fear in Boyd’s eyes and the tremble in his voice. “Baby, you can’t do this shit to me.”

Art has the indecency to smirk at the dressing down Boyd is giving Raylan. “I told you,” he says, folding his arms and clucking like a mother hen. “Marshal ain’t no job for somebody having a baby.”

“Ex _cuse_ me?” Tim and Rachel say at the same time, but Tim’s mouth is hanging open, whereas Rachel has her hands on her hips and both eyebrows raised.

“You want to say that again?” she asks Art, and their boss opens his mouth and shuts it again once he’s gotten a good look at Rachel’s face. “Please, Art. I’d like to hear more about how you don’t think somebody can have a baby _and_ do their job.”

“Raylan’s .... pregnant?” Tim’s well-honed cool has deserted him; he looks like a trout Raylan caught in the creek the summer he was eight, flopping around and horribly out of place on dry land.

“Of course he’s pregnant,” Rachel snaps, waving Tim’s stupefied inquiry aside. “What, you thought the office pretty boy was getting a beer gut?”

“Well, yeah,” Tim replies, scratching his head. “Because I’m obviously a horrible detective who thought that was more rational than _male pregnancy_. But clearly I was mistaken.” He pauses, squints at Raylan as if he’s seeing them all through his scope, building stories for them in his head. “Though it does explain that list of names he keeps scribbling out.”

“We’re not using any of those,” Boyd says quickly, as though the most important thing to convey to Tim right now is Boyd’s disdain for Raylan’s list of names.

“Thank god,” Rachel declares, and it’s possible that Raylan’s colleagues have been paying closer attention to his desk than Raylan had previously realized. “Because even a white hillbilly baby deserves better than ‘Starchild’.”

“What the hell’s wrong with Starchild?” Tim ripostes, and Art slinks away while Rachel’s distracted by listing everything wrong with Tim’s choice of names.

“I wish Coover had thrown me down the mineshaft,” Raylan mumbles, and feels Boyd’s flinch all the way down his side. “Stop worrying,” he murmurs, lower, so his nosy colleagues can’t hear. “I’m fine. The baby’s fine. Everybody’s fine but Coover, and maybe we should start worrying about what Mags is gonna do to us _now_.”

Though if Mags’s first vengeance was the baby, maybe they don’t have to worry about restarting a blood feud. Raylan ain’t thrilled with the morning sickness, but it comes with Boyd and a house and a tadpole that might one day have a shock of dark hair, twinkling brown eyes and its daddy’s grin.

“Speak of the devil,” Boyd whispers, and nods at the Bennett SUV that’s just pulled into the clearing and parked.

They step up to meet her, which really isn’t Boyd’s place, but Raylan’s not foolish enough to tell Boyd to stay back, not when Boyd appears to be one spark away from laying the whole forest to waste.

“That’s my baby you killed,” Mags says, and her gaze drops to Raylan’s belly for a moment. It takes more effort than Raylan would like to keep his hands at his sides.

“I am warning you not to go down that path.”

Boyd unfolds into the space around them, thick eyebrows drawn over his eyes, his face shadowed and his voice dark. It makes Raylan think of blood pooling on black soil, of breathing coal and running for his life in a collapsing mine. Boyd rises up to more than his full height and Mags seems to shrink in return, smaller than Raylan’s ever guessed she could be.

“Mags Bennett, your boy tried to kill Loretta McCready. Raylan was only doing his job. And if you attempt to seek retribution for Coover’s death – well, I don’t think that you will.” Boyd stares unblinkingly at Mags, at Doyle looming behind her and frightening no one at all. “I think a woman as smart as yourself knows how much you still got left to lose.”

Raylan doesn’t think that Boyd would kill Doyle’s kids, but he’s not one-hundred percent certain, and he isn’t too eager to find out. Neither is Mags, he gathers, from the way she lowers her gaze.

“Now listen here, Crowder, if you –”

“Shut up, Doyle.” Mags cuts off her oldest son with a word, gestures tersely at the SUV. “Get back in the car, we’re going home.” She purses her lips at Boyd, both of them glaring at each other like Raylan isn’t there between them, his hand on his gun. “I’d never have done it,” she says coolly, “if I’d known it was going to be yours.”

Boyd laughs, though there’s no hint of humor in the sound. “That’s your own fault, then, for forgetting. Raylan and I dug coal together. That baby was mine as soon as it was his.”

And it’s true, in the making of this particular moonshine child, but it’s not what Boyd means, and Raylan knows it even if none of their eavesdroppers understand.

Mags climbs back into the Bennett SUV and Doyle scowls at them through the windshield like he’s contemplating running them over, but eventually he drives away.

“You die now and I’ll kill you myself,” Boyd murmurs, the words brushing through Raylan’s hair and over the shell of his ear.

It’s not much, as declarations go — Raylan wouldn’t embroider it on a throw pillow for their new sofa — but it’s enough to carry Raylan through Rachel and Tim’s questions about how Boyd Crowder got him pregnant. (“Boyd Crowder got you _pregnant_?” Tim asks, for the fifth time. “Ignore him,” Rachel interrupts. “You let _Boyd Crowder_ get you pregnant? Explain that.”) It’s enough to keep one calming hand on the small of Boyd’s back, to steer him to the town car when Raylan’s tired of questions, and to tell Art that he’s taking Boyd home.

* * *

Everyone in Kentucky is bound to hear about Raylan’s pregnancy after that, so he does his familial duty and phones Helen before she can hear about it through the county grapevine. (This is not actually Raylan’s decision. Boyd dials the Givens homestead and shoves the phone into Raylan’s hand.)

“Well, you and Boyd keeping house ain’t news to me,” she tells him, after he opens the conversation with “I’m living with Boyd in the suburbs and we’re having a kid.” “But what in god’s name would possess you to raise a child with him?”

“I had a particularly persuasive glass of Mags’s apple pie,” Raylan answers honestly, and the sound of his aunt cursing down the phone line suggests she took his meaning.

“We can fix that,” she consoles him, once she’s wound down. “I can talk to Cousin Mary up in the hills.”

Raylan’s shirtless and sprawled across the couch Winona donated to them from the wreckage of her second marriage. There’s a baseball game on the television, and when Raylan allows it Boyd changes the channel to a tedious documentary on the first stirrings of the Renaissance. Boyd is mumbling facts about Italian sculpture to the river eel stretching out Raylan’s belly, his hands pressed to Raylan’s stomach in the hopes that he’ll feel the fluttering Raylan had blamed on indigestion but the doctor swore was the baby kicking him in the ribs. (She had seemed surprised that Raylan wasn’t more bowled over to learn that their child was kicking the shit out of his insides. “Why would I be?” Raylan had wondered. “You put a Crowder and a Givens together, you’re bound to create something with more temper than brains.”)

“We’re naming it Bradley,” Raylan says, instead of responding to Helen’s offer, because if he tenses up Boyd will want to know what his aunt said, and Boyd doesn’t need to hear Helen’s kind offer to flush Bradley down the drain. “We think it works for a boy or a girl.”

“If we were having a goat,” Boyd mutters, blows a raspberry on Raylan’s distended stomach, and then returns to describing the struggle to build Florence a dome.

Helen hums and doesn’t say anything else about contacting their hill folk kin, because Raylan’s aunt has always been shrewd. She also doesn’t shower them with congratulations and promises to knit the baby a blanket, but Raylan watches Boyd have an animated conversation with the swell of his stomach and doesn’t really mind.

“You know your daddy’s gonna find out,” Helen finally says, leaves unspoken the promise that he won’t hear it from her. Raylan’s inordinately grateful that Arlo tried to kill him a few months back, because attempted murder seems to have cured his aunt of the belief that Raylan and Arlo ought to reconcile.

“Ain’t no business of his,” Raylan contends, and the ugly undercurrent in his tone draws Boyd away from his didactic pursuits. He slides up Raylan’s chest, slots against Raylan’s side, his chin digging into Raylan’s shoulder as he peers through Raylan’s scowl with his penetrating gaze. Raylan rolls his eyes — Boyd’s been overprotective since his first day at the mines, and if pregnancy made it ten times worse, well, it’s been nearly unbearable since Raylan shot Coover Bennett dead — and debates pushing Boyd off of the couch. “He can find out whatever he likes, long as he stays the hell away.”

“You know how your daddy is,” Helen says, and Raylan’s jaw clenches tight. He does know how Arlo is. Better than anyone left alive. “And you,” she adds, once the echo of her last words fades away, and Boyd’s distracted Raylan by blocking his view of the baseball game. “You’re ... happy, about all this?”

Why, Raylan wonders, is that the question that everyone asks? Do they really believe that Boyd Crowder is powerful enough to coerce Raylan into a pregnancy and a house and a whole goddamned life that he doesn’t want, or that Raylan is weak enough to submit?

Something of Raylan’s displeasure must convey itself through his expression, or through the tension in the fingers previously doodling lazy patterns between Boyd’s shoulder blades, because Boyd darts one hand out and snatches the phone away.

“Now look here, Miss Helen,” Boyd says politely, twisting to keep the phone away from Raylan, though Raylan ain’t trying all that hard to get it back. “I am certain you have a host of aspersions to cast on my character,” he concedes, which hadn’t been what Helen had said, but was more or less what she’d meant. “But perhaps I can alleviate a few of your concerns by assuring you that I would bleed willingly and joyfully for your nephew, a happy martyr to love’s crown and crucifix both.”

“You think I didn’t know that, boy?” Helen replies, sounding unmoved by Boyd’s romantic ramblings. “You think I’m stupid, that I couldn’t see you tumble head over heels for Raylan when you were a scrawny ass teen?”

Boyd’s close enough for Raylan to hear both sides of the conversation. Close enough to watch Boyd blush and look carefully away from Raylan.

Boyd coughs and can’t seem to produce a quote to fit the situation Raylan’s aunt just put him in. Raylan laughs, can’t help it, wishes he had a picture of Boyd red-faced and scrabbling for words, mortified by his past as a teenage boy with his heart on his sleeve.

“You take care of him,” Helen commands, saving Boyd from sputtering denials he wouldn’t mean. “My nephew ain’t never heeded reason, and he makes himself bleed just to pretend it don’t hurt.”

Raylan stops laughing. He grabs at the phone to hang up on his aunt, but Boyd’s part serpent and slithers away.

“He’s an ornery fuck,” Boyd agrees, and Raylan scowls at them both.

“Almost as bad as you are, Crowder.” Boyd glances at Raylan and shrugs, because it’s easier to accept Aunt Helen’s facts than argue them and lose. “When you boys kick the shit out of each other, don’t come running to me for band-aids and iodine.”

Boyd smiles toothily at Raylan, elated with the blessing that Raylan’s aunt didn’t give.

“Yes ma’am,” he says. “I mean, no ma’am, we won’t.”

Helen snorts derisively at Boyd’s giddy prattle, and Raylan can picture her holding their old beige phone in one hand, standing at the open kitchen window with a cigarette. She used to wait for Raylan to come home from baseball practice in the afternoons, sitting at the table with her sister with a candy bar hidden in her purse and lipstick that smeared across cigarette butts and Raylan’s cheek.

“Is that everything?” she wonders, and doesn’t give Boyd time to respond. “You go ahead and hang up, then. You’ve already chattered through half of _Wheel of Fortune_ , and now I’m going to have to send Arlo to the attic for Frances’s knitting needles and Raylan’s old toys.”

“We apologize in advance for the inconvenience,” Boyd declares gallantly, but Raylan’s pretty sure Helen can hear him grinning delightedly through the phone. “You have a good evening, Helen. If you’re ever in Lexington, you give us a call.”

The phone clicks off and Boyd turns the full force of his grin on Raylan.

“Don’t know what you’re smiling about,” Raylan says, smoothing his hands down the muscles of Boyd’s back, the bumps of his spine. “All I learned from this conversation is that you’ve been head over heels in love with me for more than twenty years.”

Boyd lifts his head, kisses Raylan’s chin, the corner of his mouth. “Raylan Givens,” he murmurs, the words blown softly over Raylan’s lips. “I’ve been in love with you since the beginning of the universe, since the fires were lit in the very first star.”

“It’s amazing,” Raylan tells him, eyes wide and guileless, smirk curling the edge of his lips, “what you’ll say to get laid.”

“Like your pants ain’t already down,” Boyd retorts, and leans in for a real kiss before Raylan can deny it.

Not that Raylan had any plans to deny it. He’s got better things to do with his time than to argue with truth.

* * *

Raylan had started preparing for it after the phone call to Helen. He’d spent the rest of the work week staring through the office’s glass doors, head jerking up to glare at the elevator each time it dinged. He’d canvassed the neighborhood on his way home in the evenings, looking for a beat-to-shit truck that wasn’t Boyd’s, though Boyd had made him stop doing that after the neighbors complained.

Then a few weeks passed — all Raylan’s time passed in weeks, now, twelve and out of the first trimester, sixteen and unpleasantly bloated with it, twenty and thankfully halfway through this damn pregnancy — and Raylan let his guard down. He focused on finding clothes that fit, on ignoring the ignorant jackasses at work who had opinions about a pregnant man or a queer or a marshal in a committed relationship with a criminal mastermind. Rachel stared down anyone who felt they needed to voice their thoughts on Raylan’s pregnancy. Tim set a sniper rifle on his desk and loudly invited anyone who had a problem with queers to help him practice his aim. Raylan made everyone promise never to refer to Boyd as a criminal _mastermind_ ever again.

Winona slept in their guest room for a week, which prompted Raylan to devote his entire weekend to finding her an apartment because he was a decent man who didn’t want to give birth in prison after murdering his ex-wife. Ava came up for dinner twice, and charmed Winona and Leslie with the same winsome smile that had won over Art.

(“Has nobody warned them that woman tried to shoot me?” Boyd wondered, measuring out the coffee grounds while Raylan scooped ice cream and sliced pie.

“Are you saying you didn’t deserve to get shot?” Raylan retorted, and distracted Boyd by licking vanilla ice cream off the scoop.)

They’re at Ava’s when it finally happens — once Raylan’s forgotten to wait for it with every opened door — down in Harlan for their first home-cooked meal in a week. Raylan’s standing on an old fruit crate in the living room while Ava jams pins into the rough version of a shirt and occasionally into Raylan. Boyd is sitting on the divan with a glass of the bourbon they brought as a gift, because Raylan’s having a baby with an ungracious hick.

Ava’s playing some godawful pop music on the radio, because she’s realized that it’s her house and her rules — and because she keeps her shotgun in the front hall, and offers to fetch it when Raylan complains — but it’s not so loud that they can’t hear the rattle of an old engine coming up the drive.

Raylan reaches for the gun and holster he’d unclipped from his jeans. Boyd sets down his drink.

“Calm down,” Ava chastises them through a mouthful of straight pins, though her knuckles are white where she’s gripping the loose fabric of Raylan’s shirt. “I lent my curling iron to Delly Grint a few days back. It’s probably –”

Arlo crashes through the screen door, punctures Ava’s hopeful assertion and sends the air hissing out of the room.

“Asa said you’d driven past,” Arlo declares. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, boy, coming here to shame the family name?”

Raylan’s head throbs, the pain in his temples sudden and sharp, but he keeps his hands at his sides and wrapped around his gun. Asa’s tracked every car driving by the VFW for longer than Raylan’s been alive; he should have known the old man would recognize him, and that Arlo would be in the VFW drinking away the afternoon.

“I wouldn’t worry,” he says, dry as a summer drought. “I doubt my law-abiding tendencies will discredit your efforts to keep the family name rotting in the slurry pond where it belongs.”

He ignores Boyd, who is expressing his incredulity at Raylan’s tendency to abide by any law he can’t shoot, and Ava, who’s still holding on to his shirt.

“The whole county is talking!” Arlo spits, striding into the living room, unafraid of Ava’s pins or Raylan’s service weapon or the violence inked into Boyd’s knuckles and lurking in his eyes.

“Oh yeah?” Raylan stands his ground, wishes his daddy had gotten small as well as old, but he and Boyd weren’t raised with the sort of daddies a man could outgrow. “And you been listening, I guess, which just goes to show an old dog _can_ learn a new trick.”

Arlo’s foaming at the mouth, nearly, and Raylan remembers standing in the VFW a year back, Arlo’s hand across his cheek in front of Art and Tim and everyone with eyes to see. His colleagues had been mortified on his behalf, but Raylan had rubbed the sting away and smiled.

“First you go and let the government fuck you in the ass for a paycheck, and now you’re letting a Crowder make you his bitch?”

Arlo’s lived in the holler long enough to know that ain’t how hill magic works, but Raylan’s not planning on fighting to regain the dignity Arlo believes he’s lost. He’ll make no apology for enjoying everything Boyd brings to their bed; he’s just grateful they’ve both learned a thing or two about sex in the twenty years he was gone.

Raylan arches his eyebrows. “Why, Arlo, I thought you’d be proud that I was carrying on your legacy, in that regard.” He leans in, close enough to see the vein throbbing in his father’s forehead, the burst capillaries in his rheumy eyes. “How far was it, exactly, that you bent over for Bo?”

Raylan’s expecting the flat of his daddy’s hand on his cheek. He’s not expecting Boyd to appear between them like an unwelcome mirage before Arlo can strike, but he probably should have been. Should have depended on Boyd to intervene.

He’d been angry with Boyd, at the beginning of all this — or the middle, because there are no clear beginnings in Harlan, only centuries of middles and sudden, bloody ends — for not depending on Raylan to help him with the thugs from the mines. He’s learning now that depending on someone is no easy thing.

(“You’ve never leaned on me,” Winona shouted, as they boxed up their house and their marriage and said good riddance to them both. “Not once in six fucking years!” Raylan hadn’t understood why that had upset her, then, that her husband would spare her his pain. Raylan didn’t lean on anybody — except once, underground, when he’d held a boy’s hand and run for their lives.)

“Arlo. We’re so pleased that you stopped by,” Boyd lies heartily, a snake oil salesman in jeans and one of Raylan’s faded USMS t-shirts. He’s careful not to touch Arlo, and equally careful about leaving a clear line of fire for Raylan’s gun. “It’s always nice to hear from family. But I think it would be best for all of us, now, if you saw yourself out of Ava’s lovely house and off of her land.”

Boyd always had liked poking rabid animals with sticks.

Arlo smirks, shows Boyd a mouth full of tobacco-stained teeth. “What makes you think that baby’s yours?” he wonders guilelessly, and Raylan is starting to resent the constant insinuations that he can’t keep his dick in his pants.

Boyd huffs out a laugh, shakes his head and thankfully doesn’t launch into his well-rehearsed speech about Plato’s concept of the soul and what that’s got to do with fathering children or digging coal. It’s those small mercies that make Raylan believe there might be a God.

“Because it has my smile,” Boyd replies, which is utter bullshit. They can’t even find the kid’s genitals, in the sonogram; Raylan’s not convinced it has a mouth. Though it is Boyd Crowder’s kid, so Raylan supposes it’s also possible that the child starts talking bullshit in the womb. “I’d be happy to show you the pictures from our last ultrasound, if you’d step out onto the porch.”

Raylan sidles a step to the right, because he doesn’t really want to shoot another man in Ava’s house, but he’d rather do that than accidentally shoot Boyd twice. Ava’s peering longingly at her shotgun in the hall, and Raylan spares a moment to be grateful that it’s out of reach.

Raylan’s daddy isn’t stupid, and his sense of self-preservation has kept him in one piece decades longer than he deserves. He holds up his hands, slouches his shoulders and backs toward the door, an old wolf hiding its teeth.

“I did what I could with you,” he says, a step away from the door, disregarding Boyd’s protective stance and aiming his words at Raylan. “Your mother babied you, and look how you turned out. You think you can raise a son any better than me? I give it a year before you’re reaching for the belt.”

He walks out the door before Raylan can shoot him, but Raylan considers firing through Ava’s front window all the same.

Boyd doesn’t turn around until the sound of Arlo’s truck fades away, but once it does he spins fast, reaches for Raylan before something pulls him up short. Raylan’s not certain what devil Boyd can see riding him, but he’d sort of like to know, because it’s the first thing besides running that’s kept Boyd’s hands off him in more than twenty years.

“Raylan,” Boyd says, embraces Raylan with soft words instead of callused hands. “Raylan, you know your daddy’s a liar and a bully. You know that. Ain’t a word comes out of that man’s mouth that hasn’t split down his forked tongue. Don’t you listen to him, baby,” he pleads. “On your worst day, you’ll still be a hundred times better than he could ever hope to be.”

Raylan wrinkles his nose, peers skeptically at Boyd. “I ain’t worried,” he promises, and it’s the truth. (At any rate, it convinces Boyd that Raylan ain’t made of fine china and precious gems.) “I figured once the kid got ornery, we’d just ship him off to boarding school.”

“That ain’t funny, darling.” Raylan blinks innocently at Boyd and Ava muffles her laugh in the seam she’s letting out. “Raylan Givens, we are not sending our child to boarding school. We can’t afford to, first of all, but even if we could, it ain’t – do you know what they teach kids in boarding school?”

Raylan winks at Ava, leans into the arm Boyd’s curled around his shoulders, and lets the warmth of Boyd’s rant wind around him, tells himself it’s sufficient to cure the chill that Arlo’s false prophecies left behind.

* * *

Boyd finds him pacing their living room at three am; and, since the morning sickness tapered off around week eighteen, Raylan doesn’t have a ready explanation for why he’s holding a full glass of bourbon and trying to wear a hole in their floor before dawn.

“Your baby’s kicking,” he announces, because distracting Boyd these days is like shooting fish in a barrel: wave a sonogram at him or threaten to name the fetus after Mags and Boyd takes off like a bull after a red neckerchief.

Though this particular con may have run its course, because Boyd simply steals Raylan’s bourbon and expresses his disappointment in Raylan’s shoddy lie with several sleepy blinks and a large yawn.

“Are you coming to bed?” Boyd inquires through the yawn. “Or would you prefer to fret about your daddy’s latest bastardy here? And before you get all riled up, I’m only asking because you’ll need to fetch me a blanket from the linen closet if you’re forcing me to sleep on the couch.”

“You’re an asshole,” Raylan informs him. Boyd raises his eyebrows, looking nonplussed, and takes a healthy swig of the bourbon Raylan hadn’t touched. Raylan drags his fingers through his hair and pulls, debates telling Boyd that he’s fine and sending the man back to bed. Then he thinks about how his chest ached, months back, when those men planned to kill Boyd and Boyd didn’t call.

“Boyd, you’re an asshole,” he repeats, because he’s making an effort, but, goddammit, it’s three am and Raylan’s been awake since midnight and Boyd could have the decency to listen to what Raylan is trying to say instead of smirking when he’s called names. “Your daddy raised you to be an asshole! And so did mine,” he adds, and at least Boyd’s finally paying attention, if his scowl is any indication. “And here we are, two full-grown assholes who’ve both pointed guns at our daddies’ heads.”

“They always drew first,” Boyd attests evenly, but Raylan waves this mitigating factor away. Self-defense might win them a trial, but it won’t make them good dads.

“I don’t want to raise a boy up in our image.” Raylan collapses onto the sofa beside Boyd, slumps forward over his stomach and rests his head in his hands. “But it’s all we know, Boyd.” Little League had baseball bats and broken knees, deer hunting had guns — a Harlan boyhood was steeped in weapons and blood.

Boyd sets the empty tumbler on the coffee table, slides his palm down Raylan’s spine in one long, soothing stroke, drags his hand back up to Raylan’s neck and does it again.

“Then we’ll learn something new,” Boyd promises, then yawns and adds, “if that’s what it takes to get some sleep in this house.” Raylan scrubs at his eyes and jabs an elbow in Boyd’s ribs. “But we ain’t learning anything in the middle of the night, Raylan, so stop worrying an old bone and come back to bed.”

“You think you could learn not to be an asshole?” Raylan asks, but he holds out his hands and lets Boyd haul him to his feet and push him toward the stairs.

“It’s an age of miracles,” Boyd answers, stumbling after Raylan down the dark hallway and back into their room. “It’s entirely possible that I am a goddamn saint, and all the saints would be assholes if their paramours woke them up every fucking night at three am.”

“I don’t think saints have paramours,” Raylan points out, dragging the covers back to his side of the bed, because Boyd might have stopped robbing banks but he’s still a thief. “I’ve also never heard tell of a saint that committed sodomy on a regular basis, nor any other lewd and indecent acts.”

Boyd rolls over and tries to smother Raylan with his pillow, but Boyd’s pillow is some miserable contraption filled with rocks, and it might successfully bludgeon Raylan to death, one day, but it will never suffocate him.

After a few seconds, Boyd gives up and tosses the pillow aside. “I’ll show you lewd and indecent acts,” he growls, and the kiss that follows tastes like stale saliva and good liquor.

They don’t get back to sleep for a while, but Raylan wakes up more relaxed than he’s been for days.

* * *

“There!” Dr. Ellison taps the monitor, where the tadpole that now looks more or less like an actual baby squirms around on screen. “Look at that.” Dr. Ellison has seen them every few weeks for almost six months, now, and yet continues to sound shocked by Raylan’s pregnancy every time they come in. “She’s finally stopped hiding from us.”

“She?” Boyd echoes, though he doesn’t glance away from the screen, transfixed by their baby’s large head. Raylan worries that the kid already has Boyd’s forehead, and he’s not sure if an oversized forehead is more or less desirable than the ego Boyd built to match.

“She,” the doctor confirms, smiling weakly at them after checking to make sure Raylan’s gun is still on his hip. “You’re having a girl.”

“Well, shit,” Raylan says, drops his head back onto the padded chair and exhales, feels his chest inexplicably expand. “We don’t know a goddamn thing about raising girls.”

Dr. Ellison rounds on him, looks like she sucked on a lemon and plans to spit the seeds at Raylan. “Now see here, Mr. Crowder,” she begins, and Raylan half expects her to wave the ultrasound wand in his face.

“It’s Deputy Marshal Givens,” Boyd corrects her, before she can work up a full head of steam. They’ve never been on a first-name basis with their obstetrician. Raylan blames this on Boyd’s habit of fiddling menacingly with Raylan’s gun every time the woman mentions Raylan’s condition and the medical community in the same breath. “And I think you’ve got the wrong idea. Raylan ain’t disappointed, Doc. He’s relieved.”

The doctor raises arches one narrow brow at Boyd, telegraphing her disbelief, and Raylan appreciates that her feminism apparently trumps her fear of his gun. Maybe she can babysit their daughter and teach her how to stand up to men.

Boyd shrugs off her skepticism and looks back at the screen where their little girl has returned to her favorite pastime, kicking whichever of Raylan’s organs she can hit. “You’ll pardon my language, ma’am, but you see, if we don’t know a goddamn thing about raising girls, then there’s a better chance she’ll never feel compelled to point a gun at our heads.”

Dr. Ellison _strongly_ recommends they read an entire library of books on parenting girls and rearing strong women, and Raylan contains his surprise when they once again make it out of the clinic without anyone threatening to call CPS.

A girl. Raylan rests his hand on the swell of his stomach and their daughter responds by doing a flip, creating a strange, weightless lurch in Raylan’s gut.

He brushed Winona’s hair, sometimes, until she winced and took the comb away because he’d pulled out too much hair. And for a second, in 1991, he considered piercing his ear. Girls have long hair and pierced ears.

“What about Mehitabel?” Boyd says, steering them out of the parking lot. “You said no family names, and there’s no Mehitabel Givens that I’ve ever met.”

... This is going to be an unmitigated disaster. They are going to raise a bald daughter with an unpronounceable name. Raylan smiles, feeling as weightless as Mehitabel, rubs his thumb over the kidney she’s kicking, and thinks about a little girl covered in bubblegum ice cream, sixteen glittery barrettes poking out of her dark hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boyd is more or less quoting Khalil Gabran when he talks to Helen, though I'm fairly certain I bastardized it somewhat.


	5. Chapter 5

Loretta’s caseworker calls, sometime on the weekend of week twenty-seven, interrupting Raylan’s voluble complaints about how his fucking boots no longer fit.

Loretta’s on her third home in three months, and about to be booted into her fourth unless she stops picking fights at home and hanging out with drug dealers at school.

The caseworker says that Loretta refuses to speak to anyone but Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens, and so she’s sorry to cut into his weekend, but she’d greatly appreciate it if he could drive over and make the girl see sense.

Raylan dons a clean t-shirt and, regrettably, the pair of sandals Boyd bought him last week. When he realizes that Boyd intends to tag along he forces the man into a button-down shirt, because the last thing Raylan needs in his life is Loretta McCready’s caseworker finding out that the steady, upright US Marshal has devoted himself to a man with a swastika tattoo.

When they pull into the driveway, the caseworker is leaning against her car with her arms crossed and her lips pressed in a thin line, and Loretta is sitting at the edge of the yard kicking sullenly at some rocks near the curb.

“You look real pregnant,” she declares as soon as Raylan comes close, her eyes wide. “I mean, I know what Mags done, but – but you didn’t look it, before.”

“Thank you for that.” Raylan rubs his aching back, peers dubiously at the low curb. There’s nothing higher to sit on, no way for him to get that low without losing all his remaining dignity and asking Boyd to lower him down. “Why don’t we go out for ice cream?” he suggests, and Boyd snickers, because he’s no doubt realized that Raylan is trying to avoid rolling on the ground like an overfed pig.

“Can’t,” Loretta says shortly, wrapping her arms around her knees and glowering at her caseworker, fourteen and built from awkward limbs and breasts she’s hiding under her overalls, justifiably angry at the world.

If they’re lucky, their own daughter will make it fourteen before she flees their house for the curb, kicking rocks and taking over the high school weed cartel. But she’ll be Boyd’s daughter, so Raylan anticipates all this will in fact happen by about age ten if not before.

“I’ll go talk to Ms. Johnson,” he assures her, figures the woman will be happy to have Loretta temporarily off her hands. “You just set here and chat with Boyd.”

Loretta leaves off glaring at Ms. Johnson to stare at Boyd with slightly less hostility and far more suspicion. As Raylan crosses the yard, he hears her say, “I heard lots of things about Boyd Crowder when I was living with Mags. I wouldn’t repeat none of it, though, not where polite company could hear.”

Raylan glances over to the porch and notices what Loretta must have already glimpsed: three pairs of eyes peeping over a plastic table and around a rocking chair, her young foster siblings watching the lawn with saucer-sized eyes.

“Not to worry,” Boyd replies, squatting down to Loretta’s level with an ease Raylan resents. “I expect I’ve heard it before.”

Ms. Johnson is wary of Raylan taking Loretta anywhere with Boyd, which Raylan ascribes to her caseworker’s intuition, because it is no doubt a terrible idea to leave an impressionable child near Boyd Crowder. But he promises to have her back in an hour, promises she’ll call when she’s home; and Ms. Johnson folds.

When Raylan fetches Boyd and Loretta, he walks into a serious conversation about the nuances of drying and curing marijuana. Loretta seems to be doing most of the instructing, Boyd nodding thoughtfully and inserting occasional tidbits from his apparent study of botany. Raylan scrubs his hand over his face and tells them to shut up before Ms. Johnson hears them and takes both Loretta and his unborn child away.

Chocolate and dairy fat have been giving Raylan heartburn since week twenty, but Boyd and Loretta are threatening to give him a migraine, so he orders the largest scoop of chocolate the shop serves, and adds fudge.

Boyd appears daunted by Raylan’s ice cream cone, but that’s probably because Boyd is the one who will have to listen to Raylan bitch about the baby sending acid up his throat. Loretta reads the menu three times, and then orders the smallest, cheapest cup of vanilla they sell. Raylan goes to say something, but Boyd meets his eyes and shakes his head. He orders the most horrendously decadent sundae Raylan’s ever seen, can barely make it out under the mounds of whipped cream, and once they claim a picnic table outside, he bets his sundae against Loretta’s miniscule cup.

Loretta is not fooled. “I don’t want your charity,” she retorts, chin stuck out and brimming with pride that Raylan recognizes, the pride of poor folks scrabbling for survival and belittled by the world.

Of course, she also keeps casting covetous glances at Boyd’s sundae, because Loretta might be a Harlan girl, but she’s only fourteen.

Boyd shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says, and spoons chocolate syrup and ice cream and whipped cream into his mouth. “You could pick the manner of the bet, if you wanted,” he offers, and Raylan watches Loretta fly right into Boyd’s honey trap. “That way I couldn’t cheat.”

Boyd cheats. But Loretta can’t figure out how he does it — though she’s clever enough to know that he _did_ , which makes her twice as canny as most folks cheated by Boyd — so she grudgingly takes the sundae, and the reality of melting ice cream quickly overcomes the perceived slight.

“What’s going on at the house?” Raylan asks, once they’ve lulled Loretta into complacency with too much sugar and the muggy heat of a summer day.

She shrugs, recalcitrant, but eventually they coax out the winding, disjointed story of stupid grown-ups and dumb kids and Raylan doesn’t understand women but it’s clear even to him that the real problem is a girl who misses her parents and wants to go home.

“You know we’re having a girl?” Boyd says, once Loretta’s talked herself out.

“Yeah?” Loretta replies, but she looks interested, playing it cool so they don’t realize that she wants to hear more. If Loretta is representative of a normal teenage girl, Raylan’s going to spend their daughter’s adolescence extremely confused. Which, come to think of it, is also how he spent the six years with his ex-wife. “You give her a name?”

“Mehitabel,” Boyd proclaims, sweeping out both hands. Loretta makes a face, and it’s the closest to giggling Raylan’s ever seen her come.

“The folks at my office call her Princess Tiger Lily,” Raylan tells her, though it’s really just Tim who calls the baby that, and Raylan doesn’t shut it down because anything’s better than Starchild of the Wind.

Except maybe Mehitabel.

“You ain’t gonna name her after Mags?” Loretta smirks, teasing, and Boyd laughs. Then she goes quiet, jabs her spoon at a cherry stem and purses her lips the way she always does to keep from crying, because Harlan children are raised with clenched fists and dry eyes.

“My mama wanted to name me Grace,” she says, quieter than the cars driving past, the kids on the playground or bees humming in the summer breeze. “Daddy’s grandmama was Loretta, so there weren’t no question who I would be,” she clarifies, and Raylan thinks that’s true for every child born in their hills, no question of where they come from or who they’ll become. “But Mama had this book, about a lady who went around the world in one of them hot air balloons. The funny shaped ones, that they have at the stadiums for football games.”

“Zeppelins,” Boyd supplies, and Loretta nods.

“Yeah. And this lady, in the book, she went everywhere. She talked to the king of Abyssinia, and nearly died in Japan during World War II.” Loretta tilts her head, peering up at the distant wisps of cloud and the vast, beckoning stretches of blue sky. “She weren’t never trapped in one place, this lady. If she wanted to go, she just up and went.”

“Lady Grace Drummond-Hay,” Boyd says softly, and Loretta is still young and impressionable enough to look impressed.

“That’s it,” she says. “Lady Grace.”

“Grace is a good name,” he tells her, solemn and perhaps genuine. Raylan can never tell. “You know what it means?” he asks, and Loretta frowns.

“It’s like a ballerina,” she hazards, twirling the spoon and languidly waving her hands. “You know, a girl who ...”

“Don’t trip over her own two feet?” Raylan finishes, and he’s pretty sure Boyd refrains from hitting him for the baby’s sake.

“That’s one meaning,” Boyd agrees, nodding. “But in the Bible it means something different. It means ‘unmerited favor.’” Boyd looks over at Raylan, and his gaze is gentler than either of them merit, with the lives they have lived and the men they still are. “It’s like – like how sometimes you did wrong, I bet, but your mama forgave you anyway.”

Loretta tucks her hair behind her ear, juts out her lower lip and wrinkles her chin. Boyd’s voice drops, and he doesn’t reach across the table for Raylan’s hand, but Raylan can read the intention in his eyes.

“Sometimes grace is a second chance we ain’t done nothing to deserve.”

Loretta frowns intently at her empty sundae bowl. “You’re talking about my new house,” she says accusingly. “How my daddy’s dead but these are good folks and I oughtn’t to shout at their kids.”

Boyd laughs, bites his cheek and doesn’t fold under Loretta’s vicious glare. “Oh, honey,” he chuckles. “I wasn’t talking about you at all.” Loretta’s scowl gives way to bemusement; Boyd extends his hands and lets her read the words tattooed on his skin. “Those things you heard about me? You think they made me the sort of man who deserves a house and a baby and a man upstanding as Raylan?”

“But God didn’t do that,” Loretta blurts out. “Mags did.”

“Please,” Raylan mutters, “let’s not teach the girl to claim Mags Bennett as a god.”

“I ain’t stupid,” Loretta tells him, miffed. “I know what Mags is.”

Raylan isn’t certain that’s true, if she believes that Coover Bennett killed her daddy without his mama’s blessing, buried him without her advice about the lye.

“You ought to think about your own second chances,” he redirects, and it’s disconcerting to have a child turn their full attention on him, as if Raylan’s got any advice worth listening for with both ears. “If you want to see the world, Lexington’s a far better launch pad for a zeppelin than Harlan will ever be. And you said yourself the family ain’t so bad.”

“I guess,” Loretta concedes, hunching her shoulders and folding in a slouch.

“Besides,” Raylan continues, because he’d seen Loretta’s face light up when Boyd mentioned their kid. “Boyd and I don’t know shit about little girls. Princess Tiger Lily sure could use someone around who does.”

“You want me to stay in Lexington so as I can babysit your kid?”

“Yes,” Raylan declares without hesitation, because Loretta might be positioning herself as the kingpin of high school truants, but at least she can braid hair. “Now come on, let’s take you home before Ms. Johnson arrests me for kidnapping.”

They buy a pint of chocolate ice cream for Loretta to take home, because the girl declares she needs to practice consolidating her authority over her foster siblings to prepare for minding Raylan’s kid.

“You regret asking her to babysit?” Boyd wonders, as they sit in the car and watch Loretta cross the lawn and head inside.

“Nah.” Raylan turns his head to look at Boyd, listens to the sound of kids shrieking Loretta’s name through the screen door and smiles. “After all, what’s life without a second chance?”

* * *

It’s week thirty and they’re in bed, Boyd lying perpendicular to Raylan and reading to their kid. Raylan doesn’t mind the reading — it’s a hell of a lot better than the week Boyd tried to sing lullabies, and it’s downright enjoyable now that Boyd’s switched from children’s books to Derek Raymond novels, even if Boyd’s English accent makes him sound like a deranged Cuban from Gio’s crew.

“Now, Mehitabel Givens, the sergeant is headed into a church,” Boyd narrates, and Raylan assumes their daughter’s movement stems from a yearning to kick in her daddy’s unnaturally white teeth.

“Mehitabel Crowder,” Raylan corrects, then groans. “No. Not – I just meant that her surname is Crowder. Hephzibah or Tiger Lily or Mehitabel Crowder, because apparently we _do_ want her to aim a gun at our heads.”

Boyd stills, and Raylan can see his knuckles whiten where they’re gripping the edges of the book. Raylan frowns. He can’t see Boyd’s face unless he sits up, and sitting up involves rolling sideways and by the time he’s accomplished it Boyd will have tucked his concerns under his deadpan stare.

“Boyd?” he queries instead, and it’s an encouragement to speak and a warning not to dissemble at the same time.

Boyd presses his palm to the left side of Raylan’s belly where the sonogram shows their daughter prefers to rest her outsized head.

“You have been absent from Harlan for a long time, Raylan,” Boyd says quietly, sits up and shifts both hands to his lap, clasps them and stares unblinkingly at the far wall. “Perhaps you are not aware that in the last thirty years, the only Crowder babies began and ended as bloodstains in a marriage bed.”

Raylan splays both hands across the stretched skin of his stomach without thinking, protecting their child from a threat that doesn’t exist. He feels the blood run cold in his veins, remembers with sudden clarity Ava standing in her kitchen over a year ago, her bruised face and wounded eyes as she spoke of a son who’d never had the chance to exist.

And he doesn’t say it — would never say it to Boyd, whose little brother had never merited it, but whom Boyd had loved without reserve — but Raylan is fiercely, savagely glad that Bowman is dead.

“You’re worrying over nothing,” he says, fights to keep his voice level and free from the anger thrumming under his skin, the desire to drive to Harlan and empty a clip into Bowman’s grave. “You hit like a girl, and I’d shoot you again before you got in one good swing.”

Boyd has the poor judgment to appear comforted by this promise, which Raylan figures goes to show that they belong together, because saner folks would have ended the relationship after the first fired gun.

“I ain’t thrilled about raising a Crowder,” Raylan informs him, not to mention that there hasn’t been a Crowder _girl_ in nigh on eighty years. “But I don’t want Arlo anywhere near this tadpole,” he admits. “I don’t want him in the same county. I don’t want him touching any part of her, and that includes the name carved on the tombstone in his front yard.”

Boyd opens his mouth, and Raylan can see the objection on his tongue, knows Boyd is aching to argue that _it don’t work like that, Raylan, you can’t just hide from your daddy and hope all the scars he carved into you will disappear._ But he closes his mouth on the words, takes a deep breath, swallows, and says, “Well then, Mehitabel Crowder it is.”

“I did not agree to that,” Raylan protests, and Boyd grins. “Did I mention I had a great aunt named Mehitabel? She died of embarrassment, and we had to bury her under an assumed name.”

“Lying doesn’t suit you, Raylan,” Boyd chastises him, leaning against the headboard and flipping through the book for the page he’d folded to mark his place. “What’s our daughter going to think, she hears you insulting her good name?”

Raylan rolls onto his side, uses Boyd as a disturbingly bony full-length pillow, and rolls his eyes. “And which of those names,” he wonders, “would you call _good_?”

Baby Crowder does a somersault, and Raylan takes that as the affirmation it obviously is.

* * *

It’s late October when Ms. Johnson calls Raylan for the second time.

Thirty-seven weeks — only a week and a day to full term, and then Dr. Ellison will _finally_ cut Baby Girl Crowder out of the uterus that will then thankfully cease to exist — and Raylan is tired of sitting, tired of office work and tired of needing help to get out of his fucking chair.

He’s suffered through swollen feet and heartburn and the end-of-summer BBQ that Boyd decided they needed to host, despite Raylan’s valid objections that he had no desire to get to know their neighbors. (It was gratifying to see that Rachel appeared equally disturbed by Mrs. Caledonia “call me Callie, you sweet thing!” Carpenter from the end of the block, and to watch Tim’s futile attempts to escape neighbor Trent Donovan’s longwinded description of the proper way to clean a grill.) He suffered through yet another party two weeks after that, although Boyd was off the hook for that one, since the baby shower had come as a surprise to them both. (They now own a car seat and a rocking chair and a crib, and more stuffed animals and incredibly tiny dresses than they can fit in one room.)

Loretta had come to both parties, her foster parents gracious enough to drive her over and pick her up. Boyd has started buying books about female pirates and aviators, makes certain to read them all before lending them to Loretta. This is either because Boyd likes to read everything from soap labels to James Joyce, or because he’s read _Girls Will Be Girls_ and _Packaging Girlhood_ too many times and is testing their theories on Loretta before enacting them on their own kid.

So it’s strange that Loretta’s caseworker would call, and not her foster mom or dad. “Is something wrong?” Raylan asks, voice low, wishing he could get out of his chair and take this call without Art glaring at him through the glass.

He’s not certain if the sinking feeling in his gut is a premonition or his daughter expressing her displeasure at the lack of space. Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that Loretta walked out of the house this morning to go to school, or the fact that she never arrived.

Raylan hangs up on Ms. Johnson, tells her he’ll be right over, and then growls at Tim to help him onto his feet.

“I’ve got to go,” he tells Art, opening the office door without bothering to knock. “Loretta’s gone.”

Art slowly, deliberately closes the folder he’s working on, leans back in his chair and stares hard at Raylan. “Do they think it’s a kidnapping?” he asks, and Raylan purses his lips, but shakes his head.

“Looks like she stole a couple hundred bucks out of her foster parents’ room,” he admits. “And some of the jewelry. But that don’t change the fact that I need to find her, before she causes herself or anybody else some serious harm.”

“I know I don’t need to tell you that you aren’t in any condition to go haring off after a teenage girl,” Art tells him, radiating disapproval. “I also don’t need to tell you that runaways don’t fall under the purview of the US Marshals’ office.” Art looks regretful. Art’s met Loretta, even if she didn’t say much in the presence of an imposing Chief Deputy. “She’s a sweet girl, Raylan. But you can’t just keep running off to Harlan whenever it calls.”

“Fine.” Raylan straightens up, settles his hat high on his head. “Then I’m taking lunch.” Art closes his eyes and heaves a sigh, but Raylan doesn’t plan on sticking around to hear anything else his boss has to say. “If I ain’t back this afternoon, then take it out of my maternity leave.”

“Raylan!” Art hollers, and Raylan moves as quickly as he can for the door. He reaches the elevators and pushes the button, flips his phone over in his hand and debates turning it off, because this is his business and Loretta is his responsibility and nobody else’s.

Then he thinks of Boyd flanked by two-bit gun thugs, back in February, thinks of the betrayal that twisted his chest when Boyd didn’t come to him. He flexes his jaw, then exhales, thumbs open his phone, and calls Boyd.

 

“Do you have a plan?” Boyd asks, once they are about an hour out from Harlan, and Raylan would be more impressed that Boyd had refrained from asking earlier if Boyd hadn’t just gotten off the phone with Art.

Between the two of them, Raylan is hardly the one with the propensity for crafting elaborate plans. He lifts one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “Find Wade Messer. Find Loretta. Keep her from going to juvie.”

Loretta has a gun and money and she is aiming at Mags Bennett, Raylan knows this without a shadow of a doubt. He would prefer to stop her _before_ she shoots Mags, but he will settle for keeping her out of prison.

Boyd inclines his head, and Raylan knows that Boyd has heard everything Raylan didn’t say. And he’s relieved, not for the first time, that Boyd is the man that he is, knows that Boyd is already plotting where to dump Mags’s body if Loretta kills her before they arrive. He’s also grateful that Boyd came when he called, because at nine months pregnant there’s no way Raylan could hide a corpse by himself.

Maybe it won’t matter. Maybe they’ll get there in time. Maybe it’s possible for a child to come out of Harlan without shooting the folks that raised her up.

Raylan doubts it, but he rests his hand on his belly, somewhere over his daughter’s head, and he hopes it’s true.

* * *

Finding Wade Messer leads to an unpleasant encounter with Dickie Bennett, and Raylan is too old and too pregnant to deal with this shit.

“Really?” he asks, exasperated, as Boyd wrests the bat out of Dickie’s hands and then slams it into his ribs. “Christ, Dickie, it’s like I hit you in the head and not the knee.” Dickie whines, begs Boyd to show a little mercy, but Dickie would have taken a swing at Raylan’s head if Boyd hadn’t come up behind him holding a gun. From the conflagration in Boyd’s eyes, Raylan doubts it’s a crime he’ll soon forgive. “You do know I’m pregnant with _Boyd Crowder’s_ baby, don’t you? And you thought, what, that you’d hit me with a baseball bat and he’d let you _live_?”

Boyd smiles down at Dickie, teeth bared in a death’s head grin. “Oh, this’ll be good,” he promises. “I ain’t killed a man since spring.”

“Wait.” Raylan holds up a hand, and Dickie lifts his head hopefully from where he’d tried to tuck it into his chest like a turtle. “In the interest of time, let’s fetch Loretta first and kill Dickie after. We can use him as a shield to get into his mama’s house.”

“Now hold on a second!” Dickie squeals, squirming as Boyd hauls him roughly to his feet. “I ain’t agreeing to that!”

“Good,” Boyd snarls, chokes up on the bat with one hand, twists the other into the collar of Dickie’s coat. “I was hoping you’d say that.” Dickie’s not quite as stupid as he could be, but Boyd doesn’t give him time to do more than yelp before cracking the bat over his head.

They put Raylan’s handcuffs on Dickie, slap him conscious and put him in the driver’s seat. Well, Raylan hands over the cuffs and supervises while digging the heel of his hand into his aching lower back, but if anyone asks he’s deputized Boyd.

They make it to Mags’s house in record time. The last time Raylan took a hairpin curve that fast was after a championship baseball game, seventeen and drunk off his ass and dumb as a fucking post.

There are six morons with assault rifles and Doyle waiting for them at the front gate.

“Help me out,” Raylan demands, but he can’t admit to being all that shocked when Boyd balks.

“The fuck I will. You and Mehitabel can cover me from inside the goddamn car.”

Boyd drags Dickie out of the car, shoves him toward the cluster of armed men blocking the gate.

“You ain’t welcome here, Crowder,” Doyle announces, like that’s news. “You leave my little brother here, take your pet marshal, and get on your way.”

“It would be my unadulterated pleasure,” Boyd replies, jamming the barrel of the gun he’s apparently been keeping in _Raylan’s glove compartment_ into Dickie’s back. “We’re just here to pick up Loretta and be on our way.”

Boyd doesn’t make any mention of his intention to beat Doyle’s little brother to death with his own bat, and Raylan thinks that’s probably wise, though he’s too busy attempting to lever himself out of his seat to join the conversation.

“Loretta don’t require your assistance,” Doyle sneers. “She’s perfectly safe with Mama.”

“Incidentally,” Raylan huffs, successfully on his feet and shielded by most of the car and the door. Two of the guns swing in his direction, and Boyd’s face goes sickly gray. “That ain’t our main concern.”

“The girl suspects Mags of murdering her daddy,” Boyd explains, and if it’s a gambit to draw the thugs’ attention back to him, it’s a rousing success. “And she’s got a gun.”

Boyd’s point is emphasized, a moment later, when they all hear the sharp, explosive report of a gunshot from inside the house, followed by a pained cry.

Of course, Raylan doesn’t hear the cry, because the first gunshot is followed by several more in his immediate vicinity. He crouches behind the door, as much as he can, to evade the startled, trigger-happy morons with guns. Both Dickie and Boyd have disappeared from view.

They stop shooting, once Doyle shouts loud enough, but Raylan keeps his gun trained on them as he rounds the back of the car, because if Boyd ain’t standing then that means he’s ...

He’s on the ground, leaves in his dark hair and hole in his left side, blood glistening as it soaks his shirt.

Raylan’s thoughts don’t quite align, in that moment. Their daughter likes to sleep with her head on Raylan’s left side, tucked under the bottom of his ribs. Boyd says that’s because Boyd sleeps on Raylan’s left, and she’s listening to his voice. Raylan had shot Boyd out of his chair, once upon a time, put him on his back, his white shirt drenched in red. “You really did it,” he’d said, and there had been blood in his mouth and tears in Raylan’s eyes.

“Fuck you, Doyle,” Boyd says, and there’s no blood pooling on his tongue, nothing but a spiteful sneer on his lips. Raylan sags against the car, inhales and wonders if his heart is beating as fast as their kid’s. He doesn’t lower his gun, because Doyle Bennett is standing over his lover’s prone body, aiming his gun at Boyd’s head.

“I should have had my deputies take care of you months ago,” Doyle tells Boyd, and Raylan doesn’t much appreciate being ignored.

“You shoot and I’ll kill you,” he vows, and Doyle raises an eyebrow at Raylan, unimpressed.

“So I’ll shoot you first,” he determines. “Then Boyd.” He raises his weapon. Aims it at Raylan’s chest. Lowers it a hair, so it’s their unborn daughter in his firing line, and cocks the gun.

“No!”

Boyd’s scream is drowned out by the boom of a megaphone, “Federal Marshals, drop your weapons!” and the crack of a rifle, the clean shot made straight through Doyle Bennett’s head.

* * *

Boyd insists on preceding Raylan into the house, never mind that Boyd is bleeding heavily and Raylan is the one legally allowed to carry a gun. Art doesn’t want either of them in the house, but Raylan’s been ignoring an increasingly painful stomach ache all day, and he can ignore Art, too.

Mags is sitting on the sofa when they come in, shot in the thigh. And while Raylan doesn’t particularly like the woman who drugged him with ill intent, he respects the fact that she’s breathing past the injury and focused on Loretta.

Though maybe it’s not so surprising, since Loretta is the one holding the gun.

“Oh, honey,” Boyd whispers. Loretta spins to face them, her whole arm shaking, her face mottled red. She looks like one deep breath would shatter her. “Loretta, honey, don’t do this.”

“Why not?” she demands, tries and fails to point her gun steadily at Mags’s sorrowful face. “I been asking you for months, and you ain’t willing to tell me the truth. I want to know what happened to my daddy.”

She has been asking for months, wondering if they ever found out who killed her daddy, falling quiet when Raylan said they still didn’t know. Raylan should have seen this coming from a fucking mile away.

“All right.” Raylan keeps his voice soft. “All right, Loretta, if that’s what you want.”

Mags confesses, admits to killing Walt, and the fact that the three federal agents listening don’t give her pause makes Raylan think the woman truly regrets seeing Loretta standing before her, wearing her daddy’s old coat, her small hands wrapped around a gun.

“Now that you know,” Boyd says, limping further into the room. “Why don’t you give me that gun, Loretta, and let Raylan and the marshals handle Mags.”

“Don’t touch me!” Loretta snaps, and Boyd tries to lift his hands, winces, and drops his left hand back to his side. Loretta’s eyes go wide. “You’re shot,” she says, looks like she doesn’t quite believe it even as she eyes the hole in Boyd’s side. Raylan knows the feeling. Boyd has always seemed untouchable, larger than life.

Boyd braces himself against the table and attempts a shrug. “I’ve had worse,” he assures her. “Last year, Raylan shot me in the chest. If you set down that gun and join me for a whiskey I’ll tell you all about it.”

“No!” Loretta steps away from Boyd, her lower lip trembling, tears dripping down her cheeks. “She killed my daddy,” she says, louder than she’d spoken before, glances at Raylan and then at Boyd like they’re meant to understand. “I can’t – she killed my daddy, and I’ve gotta ... I’ve _gotta_.”

“No, you don’t.” Raylan sets down his gun, clenches his jaw and rides out the cramp in his gut. “You don’t have to do this. You can put down that gun, and Boyd and I can take you home. You have a choice. You can choose.”

Loretta’s face contorts, and she chokes on a sob but doesn’t lower her gun. “She’d do it for you,” she tells them, lifting her chin at Raylan’s swollen belly and the little girl swimming inside. “If you died, she’d kill the folks what done it.”

“That’s true,” Raylan nods, because it is. Their daughter is going to be a force to be reckoned with, a mind that whirls faster than a twister and a temper worse than a hurricane. “But we wouldn’t want her to,” he says. “You want the truth, Loretta? The truth is I’d give anything – _anything_ , to keep this baby from throwing her life away. And I know your parents felt the same way.”

“You don’t know that,” Loretta sobs. “You can’t know what they want because they’re _dead_.”

“Of course we can.” Boyd’s voice rings through the room, the impossible certainty undergirding his words. Loretta sniffles, stares at him like they’ve made another bet and Boyd’s once again called heads without seeing the coin. “Don’t you remember, darling? Your mama wanted to name you Grace. ‘Unmerited favor.’ Forgiveness. A woman who isn’t trapped by her past, who lives her life in the air.”

“Wh – what’s Mehitabel mean?” Loretta asks him, voice quavering but steady on the name Boyd chose for their little girl.

Boyd smiles, his face ashen and his jaw clenched against the pain in his side, but his eyes bright. “It means ‘God rejoices,’” he tells her, blinking at Raylan like he’s every good thing Boyd’s ever seen. “Or ‘He makes happy,’” Boyd rephrases, catching a glimpse of Loretta’s frown. “It’s how I feel every time I look at Raylan and our little girl. It’s how your daddy felt about you, honey. I didn’t need to meet the man to know that’s true.”

Loretta _keens_ , shrill and anguished, but she lets go of the gun. And, to Raylan’s surprise, comes to him, tucking herself against his side and mumbling at his belly. “Hi, Mehitabel,” she says, crying hard. “Hi. I ain’t gonna let anybody hurt your daddies. You and I, we’re gonna keep them safe.”

Raylan thinks that’s a hefty task for a fourteen-year-old girl and an unborn child, especially when the daddies in question are him and Boyd, but he puts an arm around her shoulders and leads her away from Mags and toward the door.

“You okay?” he calls over his shoulder to Boyd.

“Give us a minute,” Boyd replies, and Raylan can hear the strain in his voice, blinks and sees Boyd laid out on Ava’s floor, blood on his lips and gasping for breath. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

Tim and Rachel look reluctant to leave Boyd alone with Mags, and Raylan doesn’t think it’s because they’re worried for Boyd.

So he distracts them by announcing: “I think I’m in labor. Want to help find me a ride to the hospital?”

Rachel frowns. “You can’t be in labor,” she informs him, still holding a gun half as tall as she is. “You don’t have a vagina.”

“Thanks for that,” Raylan mutters, rolling his eyes. “I had wondered about the state of my genitalia today.” At any rate, he’s successfully focused their attention away from Mags and Boyd. “I didn’t say I could give birth, I said I was in labor. You know, contractions? Pain?”

“But.” Tim opens the front door for Raylan, and Raylan is too tired to gripe about misplaced chivalry. “But why would the, uh, hill magic give you contractions if you can’t give birth?”

“I don’t know,” Raylan grinds out, as another wave of pain rolls over him. “But since Mags was _punishing_ me for crippling her idiot son, why don’t you go ask her?”

“You can’t.” Boyd comes up behind them, left arm angled awkwardly to keep it away from his side. “She’s dead.”

“Excuse me?” Rachel puts one hand on her hip. “You killed that woman? When your man is having a baby and there’s a van full of federal agents to take you away?”

Boyd shakes his head, and the fact that he doesn’t shrug Tim off when the man slides under Boyd’s right shoulder tells Raylan exactly how much pain Boyd is in. “She poisoned her moonshine.”

Rachel turns back to the house, but Raylan stops her, can see from the look in Boyd’s eyes that there’s nothing to be done. It’s too bad. Raylan wanted her to suffer, for what she’d taken away from Loretta.

“Now, if it ain’t too much trouble,” Boyd says, leaning heavily on Tim. “I could use a doctor. And if I heard right, about the contractions, I expect Raylan could use one, too.”

He faints, in the ambulance they share, and Raylan plans to remind him of this moment every day for the next fifty or so years.

* * *

Mehitabel Grace Crowder is 6 lb. 10 oz., 19.6 inches long, born in Harlan County at four thirty in the afternoon, both her daddies sliced open on operating tables in different rooms. She has dark hair that points in all directions, the same as Boyd’s, a rosebud mouth and ears that Raylan blames on the hill magic and the apple pie.

She’s perfect.

Art goes to find Ava — he brings Loretta, because Raylan gives him directions but the GPS won’t find the roads — not just to meet her niece, but also to bring the baby clothes she’s made, since all their baby clothes are in Lexington nearly four hours away.

Boyd sends Rachel and Tim out to his family’s old house to find the dolls his mother boxed up and put in the attic over thirty years ago, pregnant for the second time, hoping for a girl and getting Bowman instead.

It leaves the three of them alone in the hospital room, Boyd perched on the side of Raylan’s narrow hospital bed and Mehitabel Grace sleeping on Raylan’s chest.

“Well?” Raylan whispers, can’t help bending his head to kiss his daughter’s pink, squished cheek. “What do you think?”

Boyd scoots onto the bed, jostles Raylan, and they both grimace through the shock to Raylan’s sliced gut and Boyd’s sliced side. “What do I think?” he echoes, lifting his left hand extremely slowly to brush over his daughter’s black hair. “Today I watched a man try to kill you with a baseball bat. I got shot. The girl we’re hiring as a babysitter nearly killed someone. And the woman responsible for getting you pregnant held my hand, drank poison, and died.”

“Don’t forget the part where you fainted in the truck,” Raylan murmurs, can’t help turning to kiss Boyd, lips brushing over stubble and pale skin. “Hell of a day.”

Boyd slides his forefinger into Mehitabel’s open hand, and they both watch her impossibly tiny fingers curl over his and hold on tight. She yawns, toothless and pink and perfect, and slowly opens her murky blue eyes, regards them solemnly for a moment before smacking her lips.

“I think,” Boyd begins, then tapers off, enraptured by their daughter’s fingers and her hair, her nose and her wide eyes. Raylan watches the two people he loves most in the world blink at each other. He holds onto them both. “Raylan, I think it’s the best goddamn day of my life.”

**Author's Note:**

> Just because Raylan forgives Boyd his past does not mean that everyone else is going to overlook it (nor should they!), so for the coda that dancinbutterfly and I threw together, see [I've got your flower](https://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/167456386839/justified-notfic-dont-worry-i-got-your-flower). (For some reason I can't find her original post, so this is my reblog.)


End file.
